Fear Itself

by Duffy Prendergast

  The detectives interviewed Melanie down at the police station. She, of course, denied having seen Amber during the past several months but she did admit to talking to her as would have been found out by the telephone calls. The detective had mistakenly honed in on Amber’s poor husband, Charlie, much as they had done to me when Catherine died. But of course they could find no evidence of where she had been killed. I was actually proud of what an excellent job I had done, however accidentally, at disguising my trail. And good fortune also played a role as it rained heavily the night that I had dropped Amber’s body off and there were no identifiable footprints left by the culprit.

  14

  Risky as it was, Melanie and I decided to attend Amber’s funeral mass. Sarah stayed home. It was painful and sad to see Amber’s children grieving. She had a boy, Steven, about Sarah’s age and I could tell as he walked behind the casket holding his father’s hand that he was doing his best to be courageous in his little black suit and tie and his neatly combed brown hair but the tears that trickled from the corners of his eyes unmasked his efforts. Susie, Amber’s daughter, was only four and her cheeks were red and smudged and inflamed from her ceaseless effort to wipe away her tears as she buried her head in her father’s chest while she sat upon his free arm. Susie looked adorable and pitiful at once in her body-length black adult style dress with a little white bow below the collar. Her blonde hair was pulled up and tied with a black ribbon.

  But it was Amber’s husband Charlie who extracted the most sympathy from me; perhaps because I could empathize so closely with his plight. I felt guilty for having placed him in the position of defending himself from a crime that I knew that he did not commit and I empathized with him for the loss of his wife and the realization that he would have to raise his children without her help. I had been diligently keeping up with the evolution of the case both on television and through the newspaper and the morning periodical had made mention of the leads which pointed to Charlie as Amber’s killer but he had not yet been indicted.

  I was once a proponent of the death penalty but for obvious reasons I had changed my position over the course of the past year.

  We stood between the vast pews of people, a warbling mass of dark bonnets and bobbing heads, as the priest, dressed in his solemn robe of white, praised Amber’s devotion to her children and her fidelity to Charlie. I smiled at the mention of the word fidelity in the same sentence as Amber’s name but I quickly donned a deliberately sullen expression when Melanie squeezed my hand and I looked down at her and saw that she was tearing up and sniffling. I was amazed at how Melanie had rationalized her perspective on her relationship with Amber after all of the grief that Amber had caused her over the previous months but I suppose that funerals tend to evoke the fonder memories and thus it enabled Melanie to forgive Amber’s transgressions.

  At home with Melanie later that night as we lay in bed side-by-side staring at the spinning blades of the ceiling fan above us, our bodies barely touching, Melanie asked me a startling question.

  “Did you kill Amber?”

  I heard my throat emit a dry wheezing croak. “No.” I said emphatically (though my voice cracked when I spoke) as I turned and explored her eyes, “How could you ask such a thing?”

  Guilt filled her eyes as they welled up like ponds, “I just needed to hear you say it.”

  She sniffled.

  “Where did that come from?” I lifted up and rested my weight on my elbow.

  She drew a deep breath, “I’m sorry for asking.” She turned toward me and leaned her forehead into my chest.

  “Okay, but what put that thought into your head?”

  “Well,” She drew a long broken breath, “I read that the police said that Amber wasn’t killed in her neighbor’s bed,” She sighed again, and looked up at me “and they said that the semen they found in her didn’t match his or her husbands DNA, and your wife was murdered…and I just thought….”

  “I know, but I told you I didn’t sleep with Amber that night.” I tried to hold her gaze so that she would believe my lie.

  “But you went out the next night and the newspaper said that her car got dropped off that night…and I don’t know…I just needed to hear you say that you didn’t do it.” She started to sob.

  I held her chin in my hand and I stared into her eyes so that she would know that I was being truthful. “I didn’t kill Amber.”

  Melanie hugged me, and afterwards we just laid in bed, her head resting on my shoulder and my arm wrapped around her body, listening to each other breath as our thoughts wandered, her I supposed to her memories of happier times with Amber and mine to that eventful night and all that took place. I wondered if I had left any clues behind that could lead them to me. The papers made mentioned that Amber may have had an affair but the authorities couldn’t determine who her lover might have been. Given the history of my relationship and my unknown whereabouts I figured that my name had to at least have been mentioned.

  My mind wandered to the locked glove compartment of my car in which sat, wrapped in a brown paper bag sandwiched between a stack of receipts and a leather binder, Amber’s cell phone. I had decided to keep it as a sort of memento though I knew that it was a risky thing to do; but her cell phone reminded me of the good times that we had shared during that year when we petted long distance and Amber was both loving and playful. I wanted to remember her that way before I came to know her face and the familiar touch of her soft tanned flesh and the cold-hearted alien that sometimes lived within that disguise. Amber had childishly adorned her flip-phone with little stickers of tiny red hearts around the outside edge of the face and it made me think about her innocent side; the side that had been so Beautiful before her father had molested her innocence away from her and before she had turned into a sexual deviant herself as so often happens to the victims of pedophiles. During our intimate conversations I often sensed that unsullied side of her personality when we played on the phone. It made her devious behavior seem more erotic, as though I were spoiling her wholesome purity; her virginity. It was as if I were a pedophile myself and I was enticing the child in her, as with a stick of licorice or a sweet-tart, to part her fleshy legs and offer up to me her tender prize.

  In any event I couldn’t bring myself to part with Amber’s phone so one day when Melanie was out shopping at the grocery store I took a thin scrap of plywood from her garage and I crafted a false shelf underneath of my bottom bureau drawer (which could only be detected if the drawer were completely removed) and I hid the cell phone there, still wrapped in the brown paper bag. I knew that if

  Melanie found out that I had Amber’s cell phone that she would think that I had killed her. I knew that if she found it she would not be able to trust me so I hid it where she would never find it.

  During the wet spring days that followed Amber’s funeral, through incessant days of constant coolness and steady showers of unrelenting rain that seemed as though they would never end, Melanie and I settled into a routine of sorts. She rose with me early each morning and made my coffee and breakfast while I showered and dressed for work. After I had left she would summon Sarah (I know this because Sarah told me so) into our bed and she would cuddle her as if she were her mother until Sarah crept from her groggy state of slumber to a blissful wakefulness. Then the two of them would bathe in sweet smelling powders and dry and dress while playfully giggling and teasing one another, as though they were sisters. Melanie spent her days educating and entertaining Sarah; playing games and reading and teaching her how to cook. At night I would come home exhausted from my grueling day of work and we would sit down together as a family and eat whatever delicious concoctions the two of them had created. Afterwards we would watch television together or we would play soft jazz music and read by a warm fire while we nestled on the sofa. I would inevitably fall asleep sandwiched between Melanie and Sarah, and Melanie would wake me when she was ready for bed and we would all retire for the evening.

  After nightfall during th
e week, in the bedroom, the door always bolted, Melanie would often make love to me while I lay upon the bed too tired to take the lead. She was passionate and tender and incredibly thoughtful and I just laid back and effortlessly enjoyed the dreamlike ecstasy that she so generously gifted to me through the haze of endorphins that leaked into my tired head and carried me off to sleep with a feeling of joy and contentment. I often woke up with her soft lithe body resting on my chest and me still buried inside of her and she would sense my arousal and entreat me again to engage her passively in the midst of my delirious state; and that lovemaking was the most pleasurable of all as it mixed with the fantasy of my dreams and gently returned me to my sleepy state upon conclusion.

  On Saturday and Sunday mornings I would sometimes try to repay Melanie’s benevolence by gently waking her up in a mutually delightful way as she quivered to wakefulness (although, in truth, she would often clump me on the head and complain that she had to pee!) Once I even tested Amber’s sentiment that Melanie could endure endless hours of oral provocation and Melanie came for me six times before my jaw grew so tired that it tingled from the loss of sensation. Her seemingly boundless bliss gave me greater pleasure than the intimate passion that she gave me in reciprocation. As lovers in love we were as made for one another as Catherine and I had been.

  On the weekends we wouldn’t roll out of bed until Sarah came knocking and then I would quickly slip into my pajamas and Sarah would squeeze between us and we were as the planets to the sun; in harmony with our universe. On the weekends, too, as the weather broke and summer approached, we took long drives into the country for picnics or we would drive to county fairs or to carnivals. Once we even purchased some fishing rods and reels from a flee market and we went fishing on a small rowboat on a private lake just over the Texas boarder. None of us had ever fished before and the result was as entertaining as it was disastrous. When Sarah caught the first fish I helped her to reel it in and when I pulled the large white fish into the boat it flopped around while Sarah and Melanie screamed and rocked the boat so much that I fell into the lake.

  Sometimes we would take little road- trips to video stores and the book stores and we would hunt for old movies or entertaining fiction novels. We would eat in homey little family style diners that catered to the miniscule budget that we were bound to. We shopped at the goodwill store for clothing to replenish

  Sarah’s abandoned wardrobe and to alter and enhance Melanie’s attire and as they shopped and tried on dresses and shoes they acted as though they were in Macy’s instead of second hand stores. Sarah and Melanie were like a mother to a daughter and why not; Melanie was about as blood related to Sarah as I was. But we were both as much in love with our little sociopath as we were with each other.

  I cannot recall a more contented time in my life. All of the misery that had come crashing into our lives over the previous year, like a flaming meteor shower to the supple body of the earth, seemed a distant memory as the dust settled around us instead of on top of us. I had all but pushed out of my mind the fact that I was a fugitive. We were, all of us, happy.

  * * *

  It was nearing the end of a wonderful summer and Sarah and I had lived in Kansas for almost two years. Tony and I had finished installing a new breaker panel and electrical service in a small vacant sand-stone colonial home in the small down-town area of Derby that consisted of no more than six city blocks. Tony was beginning to trust me with the more complicated tasks and I had rewired the entire electrical panel, carefully bending the red, black and white wires into neat curves and cutting and skinning the tips of the wires before sliding the bare copper into the ground bus or the compression fittings on the breakers, without his supervision while he paced around on the floor above me, his work-boots clumping like a Holstein on a barn-deck, making calls to his clients from his cell phone.

  The job that Tony had scheduled for that particular Friday fell short of the eight hours it was intended to consume so I whistled happily as I drove home with the top down on the mustang from our job in the little town of Derby with the anticipation of spending some extra time at home with Sarah and Melanie. The afternoon was hot and sunny and I could see the shimmy of heat vapor rise from the blacktop in front of me as I drove down the two lane highway and inhaled the scent of freshly cut grass mixed with wildflower pollen while the crickets sang like a monotone chorus. I passed an endless stream of small frame and brick veneer ranch and bungalow houses to my right and a flowing river of colorful purple Coneflower, Blue Flax and Black-eyed-Susan on my left.

  As I walked through the door of our house I could tell by Melanie’s worried expression that something was wrong and I could feel the muscles in my face melt like ice into a lax puddle of disquietude. I could discern by her inflamed pink cheeks and the splayed red tributaries coursing across the whites of her eyes that she had been crying. I could see by her wide stare that I had startled her. I wondered immediately if the police had paid a visit while I was away; if they had come for me. I put down my lunchbox and I wasn’t particularly soiled so I took a step toward Melanie to comfort her, but she backed away and almost toppled over a kitchen chair before regaining her balance.

  “What’s the matter? What happened?” Her eyes grew wider still.

  “What is this?” Melanie held out a trembling hand…with Amber’s cell phone in her palm, the little heart stickers pasted around the face.

  “Where…?” I felt like a little boy who had been caught with his pants down. I could feel my face flush red with embarrassment.

  “Sarah and I… decided to do some cleaning.” Her eyebrows pinched in above her nose as she sobbed the word cleaning. “You said you didn’t kill her!” She yelled through a torrent of tears.

  “I didn’t…I didn’t kill her. You have to believe me.” I opened my palms and spread my arms.

  “Then what are you doing with her cell phone? Tell me.” She wailed, “How did you get her cell phone? She wouldn’t have left without it! And if she had lost it she would have called for it. But of course she couldn’t call because you killed her!” Melanie was hysterical, like a distraught child. Her facial expressions wavered as the muscles in her face contorted violently from anger to confusion to terror.

  I took another step toward her. I wanted to assuage her fear. I wanted to convince her of my innocence; but she backed away again. “Melanie…it’s me…we love each other. Do you actually think that I would hurt you? You’re looking at me as if I were some kind of monster. I love you. I could never hurt you. I couldn’t hurt anyone!”

  “Oh you couldn’t could you? I’ve seen you in action. I saw what you did to those boys at that party. You’ve hurt people before.” Melanie pointed at me accusingly as she stepped around and behind a chair. Snot was dripping from her nose. Her eyes were puffy and baggy and she was shaking like a dog shedding water.

  “I don’t even know what happened there. I got hit on the head. To this day I don’t even remember what I did that night.”

  “How convenient! I suppose you don’t know how you ended up with Amber’s cell phone either?”

  “No,” I looked down at my feet and shook my head, “that I remember.” I sighed and walked over to the dinette chair that sat furthest from Melanie. “Where’s Sarah?”

  “What?”

  “I said, where is Sarah?”

  “She’s down the street playing with a friend. I didn’t want her to see this. What does she have to do with this?” “Sit down.”

  “No!” she yelled.

  “You’re going to want to sit down.”

  Melanie reluctantly plopped into a chair but she sat on the chair furthest from me with her legs to the side ready to run. Where she thought she would run I don’t know. If I had wanted to hurt her it would not have been difficult to catch her.

  I told Melanie the story of Catherine’s murder. I shared every detail with her from my visit to the police station to our stay in the hotel and finally Catherine’s infidelity and the unlikelihood t
hat I was Sarah’s natural father. Then I told her everything I knew about Amber’s death and the lengths to which I had gone to protect Sarah and myself as well as to try to give closure to Amber’s family.

  “Sarah couldn’t have done that!” Melanie’s voice was filled with doubt.

  “The truth is that I thought you had done it at first. But then you came over completely hysterical looking for ‘that cunt’ and I knew that you hadn’t done it. I realized then that Sarah had killed Amber. Sarah wanted us to move in with you and I told her that we couldn’t because of Amber. She had asked me what would happen if Amber should die.” I shrugged, “I didn’t give it a serious thought. But afterwards I knew.”

  Melanie’s eyes were still wide and her lips pursed.

  “Wait,” I jumped up from my seat startling Melanie so that she jumped as if she were going to bolt toward the front door. “I just remembered something else.” I said, stepping past her cringing frame. I stepped into the bedroom and opened my closet door. I reached inside my sport-coat pocket and pulled a white envelope from my breast pocket and I walked back into the kitchen and handed the letter to Melanie. She read it slowly and then reread it, as though the words hadn’t sunk in on the first pass.

  “She had that in her purse. I found it that same morning. She was setting me free.

  Melanie’s face dissolved into a flaccid sag and the tension in her continence slackened. “But how could Sarah have cut

  Amber’s throat? She’s only a child?”

  “I asked the same question. But she had killed before. And she was upset because she knew that Amber was the reason we fought that day. And she knew that Amber was the reason that we couldn’t move in with you.” I exhaled a deep sigh, “God knows I love her or I wouldn’t be here…but I’m afraid that she’s a sociopath.”