by James Newman
My neighbors were talking about me.
Floyd Beecham scowled and shook his head as he glared my way, his bony tax-collector hands balled into tight white fists. I heard him say something about “raped a little girl” and “Ben Souther told me, and he’s got no reason to lie.”
From behind a cloud of thick blue smoke Ned Pastorek nodded emphatically, said, “One hell of a coincidence, if you get my drift.”
“When you rot your brain with that kinda crap, what do you expect?” said Francine Beecham. She was leaned back in her chair, the silver cane from her recent hip surgery lain crosswise on her considerable lap.
My ears burned like they used to when I was a kid and I’d been caught doing something naughty. I swallowed nervously and thinned the gap in my doorway, straining to hear more of the conversation across the street.
The wind chimes on my front porch tingled and pinged in the evening breeze, as if threatening to betray me.
“I mean, I’m all for freedom of speech,” said Ned Pastorek. “But there’s gotta be a limit, ya know?”
“You got that right,” Floyd Beecham agreed.
“If not, then look what happens.”
“Just goes to show,” said Floyd’s wife, “you think you know someone, but you never really do.”
Mitzi Pastorek took a sip from a gold can on the porch railing beside her, pondered with a melodramatic shudder, “I wonder what he’s doing in there right now…”
I thinned the gap in my doorway some more. Winced when the door’s hinges squeaked.
A car sped by my house just then. It was Trey Glover’s new Mustang, a sleek black beast vibrating with the basso thump of rap music. For several seconds it drowned out the conversation across the street.
Back before everything went to shit, I remembered, the Beechams used to have a reputation for raising a stink about such things. Francine had even written a letter to the Tribune earlier this year complaining about the “disrespectful youth of today thinking everyone and his brother wants to hear their sordid ‘jungle music’ ” As the rumbling Mustang passed between us now, though, as I watched them across the street, none of the people on the Beechams’ porch said anything. They just watched the Glover boy go by. Francine even threw up a meaty hand in friendly greeting.
They had other things to complain about now.
When the Mustang had passed, and the street was quiet again, my eyes grew wide. I watched Floyd Beecham stand to retrieve something from one corner of his porch. The way his skinny silhouette lurched and stumbled about, I could tell he had been drinking. A lot.
“I’ll give him some of this, by God,” he announced.
It was a gun. His hunting rifle. The same one, I was sure, that he had shown Ben Souther and me just several weeks ago, bragging about it as if it were the greatest specimen ever constructed by human hands.
He pointed it my way. Sighted down the barrel.
I didn’t move. I didn’t breathe.
“Kapow!” Mitzi Pastorek giggled. “That’d do the trick.”
Floyd belched, put the gun down, and fell back into his seat. “Goddamn right. Take care of things real nice, wouldn’t it?”
I was about to turn away then, when someone else came out of the Beechams’ house. Someone I had always thought looked just like Pete Rose. The screen door slammed shut behind him. He held three bottles of beer, which he passed out to the other men on the porch, keeping one for himself.
“Now, Floyd, old buddy,” he said, “I’ll pretend I didn’t see that.”
They all laughed.
Before he plopped down on the railing beside Mitzi Pastorek, the big cop took a second to open a new pack of cigarettes pulled from the breast pocket of his uniform. He winked at his friends in the glow of Ned Pastorek’s proffered Zippo and said, “Though I gotta admit, it’d probably make our jobs a helluva lot easier.”
More cruel laughter at my expense.
I stumbled back from the door, shaking my head in disbelief.
What the hell was going on around here?
“Where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire,” said Ned Pastorek. “That’s all I’m saying.”
I did not want to hear any more. With trembling hands, I closed the door. Locked it.
I felt so confused. Alone.
And more than a little afraid.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Wednesday afternoon. Six days had passed since Rebecca Lanning’s murder.
I would never forget what I had seen. I knew the sight of that little girl lying there in the dirt, like so much garbage, would haunt me for the rest of my life.
Then there was the matter of my neighbors…
But I would worry about that later, I decided. Today I felt alive, reinvigorated. My daughter had come to visit, and in Samantha’s company my troubles of the last weeks seemed like nothing worse than foggy memories. Worries from another time, another place.
At least for a little while.
“Tag, Norman… you’re It!” The eleven-year-old giggled as Norman chased her around the backyard and a cool summer breeze engulfed us all. “Look, Dad! Daddy, look! Ha-ha-haaa!”
I turned, watched her fall beneath the golden retriever, and I laughed so hard I nearly doubled over beneath the sharp pains shooting through my ribs. Sam’s long blond hair was tangled and frizzy, her pink T-shirt and white shorts blotchy all over with grass stains from an afternoon of rolling around in the yard with Norman. Karen would undoubtedly read me the riot act for allowing our daughter to ruin her brand new outfit. She had warned me when I picked Sam up that these clothes were for the upcoming school year, so I should make sure she didn’t get a speck of dirt on them. But I hardly cared about the consequences. I would buy some Sam more, gladly. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt so complete. Hearing Norman’s gentle chuffs, the constant jingle of his dog collar, and Samantha’s carefree laughter echoing about my property as I sweated over our dinner of hotdogs and hamburgers on the grill, I could almost imagine everything was okay in my world. I could believe that things were back to normal, and we were a family again. I expected Karen to appear through the back door at any moment, balancing a tray of condiments in one hand, bowls of baked beans and potato salad in the other. I envisioned her wearing that T-shirt with the cover art to my novel Devil Woman silk-screened on the front—the very cover for which she had modeled not long after our fifth anniversary—and those tight black jeans with the sexy little hole in the left ass-cheek. As soon as her hands were free, I fantasized, she would obey the command upon my apron; she would KISS THE COOK, slowly and deeply and passionately, until Sam demanded, “Stop that, you guys! Ewww!”
I remembered what it was like. Before. When everything was perfect and in its rightful place.
And then I quickly banished such thoughts from my brain, lest I ruin my wonderful mood. Samantha was here, she was having the time of her life, and I wanted to cherish every second we spent together before I drove her back to her mother’s place later that evening.
“Get her, Norman! Get her!” I laughed, high and loud.
Overhead, a distant jet carved a long white streak in the sky. A big rig’s air brakes farted and hissed across town. Next door, I could hear Ben Souther watching a Braves game on TV: the sharp crack of a triple-bagger at least, the fervent roar of the crowd, and occasional off-color commentary from my neighbor (“Go, you son of a bitch, go! Oh, that’s pathetic! I’m sixty-three years old and I could play better ball in my sleep!”).
Humming an old Led Zeppelin tune to myself, I wiped a slick sheen of sweat from my brow. I tossed my spatula in the air, caught it. Did it again behind my back, with masterful skill. Unfortunately, no one was watching.
I turned down the gas on the grill then, and flipped the burgers one last time.
A few minutes later I called to Sam over my shoulder, “Okay, hon, you’d better go wash up now. Dinner’s almost ready!”
When she did not reply, I turned toward her, squinting through the smok
e and blurry waves of heat billowing up from the grill.
“Short-stuff…?”
My breath caught in my throat. The spatula fell from my hand, into the grass at my feet.
Samantha lay on her back in the middle of the yard, her eyes closed. Her skinny white limbs were splayed out in every direction, with the exception of one pale leg, which was bent beneath her at an uncomfortable-looking angle. She wasn’t moving. Was she even breathing? I couldn’t tell.
Norman stood over her, panting.
“Sam?”
Strobe-flash images of Rebecca Lanning’s spread-eagled corpse filled my head, superimposing themselves over my daughter’s limp form…
“Oh, God… Samantha!”
I started toward her, my heart slamming in my chest like a jackhammer. I had been a bit worried about Sam earlier, as she had complained of a tummy-ache off and on all morning. Every time I asked her to take something for it, though, she had refused, insisting she felt better. Now I cursed myself for not driving her to the Emergency Room right away.
“Sam!”
I felt as if I were moving in slow motion. The distance between us—barely a dozen feet—seemed like a million miles.
But then Norman beamed up at me in that almost-human way dogs appear to smile when they are most content. He barked once, as if to assure me that I had been the butt of a very unfunny joke, before pouncing on Sam. He nuzzled her neck, attacked her chin with his long, pink tongue, and she came alive with a flurry of giggles that allowed my heart rate to return to some semblance of normal.
“Guh-ross, Norman!” she said, wiping her shiny, dog-wet mouth with the back of one hand.
He sniffed her thigh. Licked it twice.
“That tickles, boy!”
She shoved him away, jumped to her feet.
I took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “That wasn’t funny, Sam. That wasn’t funny at all.”
“What’s the matter, Dad? Did I scare you?”
I rolled my eyes, made a farting sound out one side of my mouth. “Of course not.”
“I think I did.”
“Whatever, Miss America. Now go wash up, okay? Dinner will be ready in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”
“Okay,” Sam said, brushing grass and Norman-hair from her clothes. “If you say so. But I think I got you that time!”
I gave her a light smack on her bottom, and she took off for the house, giggling all the way.
The back door slammed shut behind her. The sound was like a gunshot ricocheting off the privacy fence surrounding my backyard. Her mother and I used to scold her for that in the past, but today I couldn’t have cared less.
I bent to retrieve my spatula, washed it off with the garden hose coiled a few feet away.
Norman trotted over to watch me work.
I smiled, gave him a scratch behind the ears. “Hungry, boy?”
He barked up at me.
“Me too. I’m famished. But don’t worry. There’s plenty for everyone. Even the four-legged members of the family.”
The retriever made a disinterested snuffling noise and plopped down at the foot of the grill. He rested his head on his paws. His eyes were watery, forlorn.
“You okay, boy?” I asked him.
He barked again, but this time it was a hoarse, half-hearted sound followed by a distressed whimper.
Truth be told, I knew exactly what was bothering Norman. Ever since that fateful Thursday morning, I could tell my dog had not been the same. It wasn’t anything I could put a finger on, really, other than a slight tension in the retriever’s haunches, a cautious twitch of his ears every few minutes. Yet I knew he sensed the wrongness that had festered within our neighborhood these last few days. An ominous feeling lingered on every breeze, like the ozone scent of a storm looming just seconds away. The air around us crackled with a strange, electric quiet. Gone were the low, rattling drone of skateboard wheels atop asphalt and the ticking of playing cards in bicycle spokes and the carefree laughter of children which normally echoed up and down our block… as if the paranoid parents of Poinsettia Lane had forbidden their offspring from venturing outside ever again. Yes, Norman felt it too. We were both haunted. I could see it in the way the retriever did not wag his tail, but kept it tucked between his legs the second my daughter was out of sight, as if he knew he did not deserve to be happy after witnessing the atrocities which had occurred just two hundred yards from where he buried his bones, growled at squirrels, and laid his furry head at night to dream his canine dreams.
He kept up the pretense around Sam. I had to give him that. But he couldn’t fool me.
“It’s okay, Norman,” I said. “Let’s try to forget about it. Let’s enjoy our time with Sam, and pig out tonight. What do you say?”
He gazed up at me, made another pitiful whining noise in the back of his throat. His tail twitched once, like a dying fish.
I squatted down beside him, stroked his golden head. “Everything is gonna be okay, boy. I promise.”
But even as I said it, I wondered if I truly believed it.
I stood then, proceeded to transfer the burgers and dogs from the grill to a plate. I covered the plate with a paper towel, slid it onto an old aluminum card table I had dragged outside for our meal. The aroma was nearly breathtaking.
Once my work was finished, I glanced toward the house. “What in the world is taking Sam so long?”
Norman’s head craned in that direction, as if he had begun to wonder the same thing.
“Sam?” I called for her. “I’m gonna eat it all if you don’t get out here!”
I watched the door, waiting for her to burst through with proclamations of “I don’t think so, Dad!” and “Not on your life!”
But she didn’t. The door remained shut. The house was silent, still.
Somewhere down the street, a car backfired. A strong breeze whispered through the trees beyond my privacy fence. A dog barked a few yards over, but Norman’s ears did not perk up.
“Sam? Honey?”
At last, the door creaked open.
My little girl stepped out.
“Come on, slowpoke,” I said. “Our dinner is gonna get cold.”
“Daddy?” A sniffle. “What’s… what’s wrong with me?”
She held her left hand open, palm-up, in front of her. She just stood there, staring at it. A single tear trickled down her cheek. Her face was pale, shiny with perspiration.
“Sam? Are you okay?”
“What’s wrong with me?” she asked again, her bottom lip quivering.
She staggered across the lawn toward me, her teary gaze never leaving her left hand.
I met her halfway.
“Baby, what is it? What’s the matter?”
The tips of my daughter’s index and middle fingers were smeared with dark brownish blood.
“I’m scared,” she said. “D-Daddy, what’s happening?”
“Jesus,” I whispered, throwing my arms around her. My heart leapt into my throat. I glanced toward the house, and for those first few seconds I wondered if someone lurked inside my home. Perhaps the same person who had hurt Rebecca Lanning…
“Oh my God, Samantha, what—”
And then, suddenly, it hit me.
I felt like such an idiot.
Between her legs, Sam’s white shorts were also speckled with several dime-sized dots of dark blood. Not much, but enough to make me realize what had happened here. What was “wrong” with her.
“Oh, baby…”
“Daddy?” she said. “Am I dying?”
In spite of the situation, a nervous chuckle slipped out of me. I couldn’t help it. Because my fear was instantly replaced with an almost dizzying sense of relief.
“No, sweetheart,” I said. “Not at all. You’re not dying.”
“Really?” she wept.
“Would I lie to you?”
I kissed her forehead, brushed her long blond hair out of her eyes.
“Daddy… ”
She bu
ried her face in my chest, and her body hitched with sobs. I could feel the sticky discharge on her fingers staining my shirt collar, smearing across the nape of my neck.
“It’s okay,” I told her. “Shh. Sam, it’s okay…”
As I held her, I clenched my fists behind her back. I couldn’t believe her mother hadn’t told her. Damn you, Karen, I thought. My ex-wife had been so busy carrying on her torrid affair with Captain Studmuffin, she hadn’t bothered explaining to Sam that something like this might happen soon. Would happen soon. That our little girl’s body was changing day by day, and it would only be a matter of time before she was no longer a little girl.
Now the task had been left up to me.
I wished Karen were standing right there in front of me so I could give her a piece of my mind.
My cheeks grew hot. I had never felt so awkward in my life. But I knew what had to be done.
First things first, I turned to Norman.
“Stay,” I told him, in the most no-nonsense voice I could muster. I pointed at the food on the table. “Don’t you even think about it, furball. I mean it.”
The retriever whined up at me as if I had deeply offended him. Come on, Andy, his big watery eyes seemed to say. Give me the benefit of the doubt, would ya?
I picked Samantha up, and carried her into the house like I used to when she was an infant.
“Everything is going to be fine, honey,” I said, easing her down onto her feet in the hallway outside the bathroom door. “I want you to take a warm washcloth and get yourself cleaned up. While you do that, I’ll grab some clean clothes out of your bedroom. Then we’re gonna take a little trip to the store.”
“The store?” Sam said. “But what about dinner?”
“We’ll worry about dinner later. I’ll bring the food inside. We’ll heat it up and eat when we get back. For now we need to… we should probably pick up a few… things… at the Stop-N-Shop.”
“What kinds of things?”
Your guess is as good as mine, I thought. Is there a number a guy can call for such a dilemma? Some sort of website?
But to Sam I said, “Just get yourself washed up, okay? Hurry. We’ll talk about it on the way.”
