Duncan's Diary

by Christopher C. Payne

  My plan would be simple. I would disguise myself, making slight changes in my face and body, and then take pictures in this altered state. I would have to keep a completely separate wardrobe, which I would purchase only with cash. I would have my online clothes, which I personally could never wear; my online pictures could not be taken anywhere that I myself had recently been. In a nutshell, my online self would have to be completely and totally separate from my real identity. The two could never cross.

  I would then have to set up a P.O. Box under a false name for billing information. I would use this name to set up a profile on Match.com, and then attempt to find the first person to share in my new experiences. All of this was truly the easy part. The difficulty was where I would take them once I had managed to ascertain a prize, and what to do with them when I was done. I owned a house up in Twain Harte (a quaint community near Yosemite), which seemed like an adequate spot. I would just need to determine how to modify the house, transportation, and disposal. I realize it all sounds emotionless and mechanical, but keep in mind that the logistics of killing somebody needs to be mechanical. You really need to think it through, as you would an equation. If you are careful, consider all the possible outcomes, and plan accordingly, you can really do whatever you want. Luck is also a good tool, as long as it is on your side.

  Most people who see my house in Twain Harte reference its likeness to the Winchester House—with its many twists and turns and endless rooms. People have a tendency to get disoriented in the house. The house is more than 4,000 square feet, and has four bedrooms, four bathrooms, two kitchens, two living rooms, a TV room, a pool table room, and a dining room. It is brightly colored (we bought it that way) and has themes in different areas. The living room for example is the red, white, and blue with flags, decorations, blankets, knick knacks, everything red, white, and blue down to and including the furniture with the blue couch and the large, overstuffed red chairs. I am as patriotic as the next guy, but a blue couch and red chairs? What the hell were these people thinking? Still it was beneficial having everything in place. When purchasing a house in a vacation community, it is normal to have furniture included in the sale.

  We did not redecorate the house once we purchased it (slightly more than a year ago) because we rented it quite often as a vacation home and did not want the disruption. The house was split into two sections. The main part of the house contained the bulk of the square footage. There was a small apartment with an entrance up the back steps that contained one bedroom, a functional living room, kitchen, and one bathroom.

  The trick was going to be how to keep the main house rentable, keep the bulk of the apartment intact, and section off a room in between that could be completely hidden and soundproof.

  I decided to drive up to Twain Harte the following weekend and see what I could do. The house was not rented for the month of April. I was not going to see my girls much, so I could actually work on the house unnoticed. It was now the end of March, so my plan could not be shelved for reflection at all. In retrospect, had I more time to contemplate, it might have swayed me from the path on which I was about to embark. I personally believe that most people are capable of doing things that are horrible. They end up not doing them because of the time frame in which they have to talk themselves out of it.

  I was lucky enough in my childhood to have been forced to work in my dad’s rental property empire. He had purchased several houses in the communities surrounding DeSoto and had accumulated upward of 35 homes. Keep in mind, most of these were in the $50,000 range as a purchase price. Housing costs in that area are almost as depressed as you might imagine living there could be.

  I was the designated flunky on many projects, including roofing a house, installing a sewer line, hanging drywall, painting, siding, etc. In-between the open-hand slaps to the face and the balled-up fists to the head, I had at least learned a trade that might be able to help me in my current endeavors.

  Friday, April 4th, I went home, picked up my black lab and drove my Volvo XC90 SUV the twisty route to Twain Harte. Traffic was a little heavy so the trip actually took me closer to four hours versus the normal three, but it was relatively uneventful. As I pulled into the driveway, my next-door neighbor Ron was out walking his dog Buddy for his evening shit. He waved hello. Ron and Darlene would be my biggest obstacle in my planned activities. I still remember when I first purchased the house and Ron introduced himself. He stated that he had keys to all the houses on the block; he and Darlene watched most of them for the owners. My first task as a new homeowner was to make a spare key and give it to Ron and Darlene.

  This actually turned out to be a lifesaver. One weekend in the middle of winter, I woke up early to let Delilah take her morning stroll. I ran outside in my usual bedclothes of running shorts and nothing else. Delilah paced back and forth looking for the perfect spot to make her mark. As I turned to go back inside and escape from the 20 degree frigid air, I realized I had locked the door behind me and could not reenter. After 10 minutes of attempting to break into any crack in the exterior, I ran across the lawn and beat on Darlene’s door. She reluctantly opened up after several minutes and, upon seeing me, reached over grabbed my spare house key, flung it in my direction, and closed the door. She most likely saved me from frostbite and breaking a window to reach the safety of warmth. I thanked them profusely later that morning and several times after.

  I did smartly have the upper apartment and the house keyed separately. So although Ron and Darlene had access to the main portion of the house, they did not have the ability to enter the apartment upstairs. They could only come and go in the rentable portion. Still, I would have to plan carefully not only the changes that I had in mind, but also how to mask them so they were as unnoticeable as possible.

  I pushed the button on the garage door opener, pulled into the garage, and let Delilah out of the back of the SUV. She hopped out of the car, full of pent-up energy from the four-hour drive. Immediately she lost her water intake from hours earlier and, then, went about reacquainting herself with her surroundings. The house was on two lots and had a semicircle drive that entered in one side of the parcel and then emptied out on the other. My neighbor Charlotte had just recently painted her house the same color (exactly, is that not freaky?) as mine. It was a bluish gray that had a wafting smoky effect. I actually shared the driveway with Charlotte. Our houses were originally built by sisters, and they were relatively close together.

  I closed the garage door after corralling Delilah and unpacked the few items that I had brought (I kept a second set of most things at the house). I walked up the stairs. It was a little cold in the house. It was still chilly there at night, and we kept the heat off to save on the energy bill. I turned on the heat and lights, put the overnight bag down, and went immediately to the refrigerator for a beer. A nice cold Stella always hits the spot no matter what frame of mind you are in. I chugged down a nice big gulp, stretched, and went to survey the house with new motives.

  I walked down from the apartment. It ends at a wall, and you can either turn left or right. Turning right leads to a short hall that opens up to the renter’s area with the pool table room on your left and the TV room on your right. Turning left takes you either down more stairs to the garage or up a few stairs to the kids’ room. It was the kids’ room that I felt held the most promise. I would need access from the garage and access to water that was close from the bathroom. The ability to section it off in a non-obtrusive way would prove to be more difficult.

  As I sat there in a chair five sizes too small for my frame, drinking my ice-cold Stella I waited for an epiphany. It came quicker than I would have imagined. The room was about 18 feet x 45 feet – it was a very large room. When you walked up the stairs you came to a cupboard on your right with a shelf about waist high. The shelf held a dollhouse and other miscellaneous toys on top. As you walked ahead, there were three stairs leading into a pass-through bedroom that, then, led to the rest of the rental portion of the house. The ro
om continued past the three stairs and contained two bunk beds (full on bottom and twin on top and a futon that was folded most of the time into a couch). At that end of the bedroom was a window seat, spanning the full width of the room. Everything was directly above the garage.

  I could section off the portion that contained the dollhouse, wrap the stairs from the garage upward, have a door leading into my section of the house, and let the hallway move forward into the bedroom. This would require the slightest structural changes to the house, and could be explained away by changing a portion of the apartment, as well. I could simply add on some of the space to the apartment. Keeping most of the area for a hidden room would be easy. It is not like anyone ever measured the dimensions.

  I now had a plan for my personal playground. Since the main house was not rented, I went down to the TV room, flipped it on, and started a fire. That room contained an old-fashioned wood-burning stove, which was used for heating, not aesthetics. It was made from solid iron and had a large handled door on the front that once shut increased the heat in the stove to unbelievable levels. The stove could heat the entire house when it was stoked to full capacity. This meant the TV room became unbearably hot as the heat sifted through to the rest of the house. My second epiphany was disposal. I was sure that this stove could faithfully rise to a level that would allow me to disintegrate bones. Why not put it to the test?

  I ran back up the stairs, grabbed a couple of my dog’s thoroughly used and completely chewed beef bones, and threw them in the fire as it was reaching full capacity. My job now was to sit back and watch a DVD entitled Hostel II. It was about the ability to pay for the pleasure of killing people in a small village in Europe. How ironic.

  As the movie ended—and three beers into my evening—I decided that the fire idea would work (the bones were about 30 percent gone). It would take a long time, and I would have to be very diligent in my burning efforts, but that was a small price to pay. This meant that I would not be able to have mass amounts of people flow through my new procedure. I would have to take my time on the experimentation and fun and, then, slowly dispose of the remains.

  I spent the next four weekends, taking an extra Friday when possible, working on the project. It was slow going at first, but went relatively quickly after the structural portion of the renovation was underway. I put four layers of soundproof drywall and insulation into the walls, floor, and ceiling. This cut into my space of the room, but I felt it was necessary for the end result. I slightly expanded the upstairs apartment, and I must say the finished product was something of a modern-day masterpiece. I had successfully added a room approximately 10 feet x 10 feet that was completely hidden—off from the rest of the house.

  On the outside of the newly built cube, I placed finishing strips along the seams of the wall that successfully hid the door from anyone who might be looking. The door was in the upstairs apartment in the back of a closet. I felt extremely confident that there would be no way that anyone would ever be able to find it. I had added a self-release lever that worked by pushing a button at the baseboard. This released the hook holding the door, allowing it to open in. It was perfect.

  The inside of the room held a tiled floor with rubberized, washable walls. The tiled floor had a drain in the center that vented out to the back yard. The entire room was all bright white. Tile, walls, ceiling, everything was bright white. The room simply contained a metal-framed twin-sized bed with a rubber mattress, a metal side table, and a metal table like you would find in a veterinarian clinic used for examining dogs or smaller pets.

  All in all, I felt very pleased with the finished product and all the possibilities it held. I took a boom box in the enclosure turned it up full blast with some rap song and firmly secured the door. As had been the case throughout the testing and building procedure, once the door was closed you could hear nothing at all from any part of the house. The final stage was now to paint the outside area to completely hide any remnants of the newly built studio. Nobody would ever know anything about this room, and it would be for me alone, save the few select people that I invited on special occasions.

  In between my weekends working on the project and the added dimensions of the house, I spent my days at work and my evenings on Match.com. I went through a trial-and-error process where I sent out eloquent e-mails telling ladies how our profiles agreed. I talked about their desires and how we shared common interests. In total I had sent out 71 e-mails, and I had received zero responses. Each of my e-mail attempts varied slightly until finally my realization came upon receiving a few responses at one time in one week. Women simply wanted a direct invitation, no small talk.

  They were desperate to begin with and had no desire to push out the process any longer than they had to. I should start my own dating site someday and call it “desperate woman over 35 who will do anything to get a date.” Okay, a little long in the title and redundant. I don’t think you have to say both “desperate” and “woman over 35.”

  Once I realized this, I had three dates set up almost instantly, one on Friday night, one on a Sunday afternoon, and the last one on the following Thursday evening. Jill was going to be my first shot at seeing how my plan would progress.

  Preparation for My First Date

  I really needed to get some fashionable clothes that would afford me the luxury of dating a higher class of women. I had been married for 15 years and had fallen into the typical pattern of spending most of my money on my house, kids, wife, cars, and all of the typical crap that married men work so hard for that makes no sense. Buy a big house to have room to buy a bunch of shit that you will never use. Have a garage sale to get rid of all the shit to make room for more. My life was nothing more than a meaningless assembly line of factory-produced crap, but on a positive note, I was apparently efficient at it. I should put that on my business card: “Efficient Shit Producer.”

  So I embarked on an adventure to the mall with my oldest daughter. Even without talking to me she was always up for a trip to wander aimlessly from rack to rack, perusing any form of bodily coverings that were marked up 400 percent. As with all teenage girls, she was up to the task of buying clothes on all occasions.

  Jeans were the place to start. The question was: Lucky Jeans or Tommy Hilfiger? I had no idea what to buy or what was in style, but every single pair that my daughter picked out was a minimum of $100. Whatever happened to the $20 Levis? They looked as good to me as these designer jeans with makeshift holes and pre-made faded patterns, and I could buy five to one.

  I ended up with a pair of Lucky Jeans, a pair of Hilfiger, and one pair of Calvin Klein. My main decision-making criterion was how athletic my ass looked in the mirror, and these three seemed to be my best bet. I did have a nice ass. The next item was shirts. Seems like the style is a black T-shirt under a dress shirt, but you really have to go with black-on-black of some pattern. I picked a few out, was politely reprimanded by my daughter, and she then went about picking out several choices for me. I spent about four hours in total going through items and trying on outfits. This is about four hours longer than I could tolerate in that environment. Again, typical of the suburban man, I didn’t enjoy shopping at all. I did end up with a variety of colors in the shirt area, although predominately black.

  We couldn’t leave the mall without ensuring that my daughter was compensated for her fashion expertise. We ventured down to Nordstrom’s to look at jeans for her in the high-end denim section. Shortly, I realized that her jeans started at the $200 level, and worked their way up from there. What a great time to be in the denim business.

  As we walked into the money-sucking pit designated as designer clothes, a middle-aged woman approached us and asked if we needed help. She had short black hair that was naturally curly, just short of being kinky. She dressed very fashionably in a pair of slacks and a pair of black leather shoes that most likely cost more than my entire outfit. She was probably around 5’4” and weighed perhaps 100 pounds. She had a smile that lights up a room. Th
e smile always gets me. When a woman has a nice smile, it seems like everything else fades into the background. It is, in my opinion, the most expressive part of a woman. Give me a woman with a great smile, and I can overlook anything else. That always makes me wonder how I married my soon-to be ex-wife. Her smile was severe and painstakingly sharp. I always used to secretly joke to myself that her words came out so edgy because they had to work their way out of her taunt, stretched mouth that sharpened every syllable as it micro-pressed its way through the angled opening.

  We began the process of my daughter trying on jeans. I ended up buying three pair, four shirts, T-shirts, and a belt all in the time it took my daughter to find one pair of a designer-labeled denim fashion statement. I can’t believe the process that a woman, young or old, goes through to find perfect-fitting clothes.

  The good news is it allowed me time to get to know Sherene, the woman who helped us. She had two kids, was in the process of getting a divorce, and was looking for a place to live. Apparently, her husband’s family kept their house in trust to avoid losing it in just this situation. Good for them, but it sucked for her. Her husband was a member of the National FBI team that investigated serial killers. I thought at the time how ironic it was for us to share this oddly placed connection. He was gone most of the time on business trips, was very distant, and had grown into a sullen odd man. At least this was Sherene’s take. She had just gotten a day job at a venture capital company as an assistant and worked evenings and weekends at Nordstrom’s.