by James Newman
Our lives would return to normal. Friendships would be mended, apologies made. Once that little girl’s murderer was rotting behind bars where he belonged, we would persevere. Together. We would rebuild everything we had lost.
Eventually, this storm would pass…
Or so I thought. I pretended to believe as much.
Until the following Monday morning, when I awoke to find something in my driveway which made me realize my nightmare was just beginning.
***
I rose from bed several hours later than usual, after toiling on A Feast of Souls till well past three a.m. the night before. First things first, I started a pot of Starbucks Breakfast Blend in the kitchen. I turned on the radio atop the refrigerator. As the coffeemaker gurgled and hissed and two obnoxious WKRZ morning show deejays tried too hard to be hilarious in a skit about Richard Simmons being abducted by aliens, I tore open a box of strawberry Pop-Tarts and slid one into the toaster.
While the coffee brewed, I padded to the front door in my pajamas and a pair of old flip-flops.
Dust motes danced in the bright shaft of sunlight bleeding through my living room window. From somewhere down the street came the loud beep-beep-beep of a reversing garbage truck. A melodious duet between two flirting sparrows. A few seconds later, the shrill whine of an electric saw drowned out everything else—Freddy Morgan and Lorne Childress beginning their day’s work on Morgan’s new deck.
The smell of percolating java filled my house. I yawned, stretched. My bones creaked and popped, reminding me that I wasn’t getting any younger.
I opened the door, stepped out onto my porch into the path of a morning breeze.
And instantly my pulse quickened.
At the end of my driveway, half on the street and half on the curb bordering my property, my garbage can lay on its side like the fat green carcass of some plastic beast that had sprawled there to die overnight. Its lid sat a few feet away, wrenched from its hinges.
The can’s contents had been strewn everywhere.
I frowned. Swallowed nervously. Winced at the taste of my own sour morning breath. A low droning noise, like the ominous rumble of approaching nuclear warheads, filled my brain as I tried to comprehend exactly what had happened here…
A pesky stray dog had gotten into my trash. Perhaps a reckless driver had swerved off the road in the middle of the night, committing a troublesome but otherwise harmless act of hit-and-run upon my garbage can. That was all.
I wanted to believe as much, tried like hell to force myself into accepting one of those scenarios, but after another minute or two of standing there staring at the pandemonium in my front yard, I knew I was wrong.
There was something too meticulous about this mess. A methodical sort of pattern, almost, to the rainbow of refuse cluttering the far corner of my property. None of my eviscerated garbage can’s guts littered the street. Or the Sommersvilles’ yard adjacent to mine. The Hefty bags in which I discarded my daily trash had not been ripped open haphazardly; rather, their yellow tie-strings had been carefully unknotted, as if by human hands.
This was not the work of teenaged vandals or starving mutts scrounging for discarded leftovers. Somehow, I could tell…
The cumulus before me bore the appearance of items that had been picked through. Sorted.
As if the culprits were searching for something.
Slowly, I staggered down the steps of my front porch. My heart raced, and my legs felt like they had turned to liquid.
What had they been looking for? I wondered as I approached the mess on my lawn. Who had done this? Why?
In the backyard, Norman barked twice. A lawnmower engine stuttered to life somewhere down the block. An electronic car-lock chirped like an excited bird.
But I barely heard any of it.
Still shaking my head, cursing beneath my breath, I bent to clean up the mess: that filthy agglomeration of used coffee filters, crumpled junk-mail envelopes, flattened soda cans, and stinking, soggy leftovers from a divorced father’s countless lonely dinners.
. . . and then I saw it.
Looming a dozen feet or so from my overturned garbage can, in my peripheral vision: something small, white, moving.
I flinched, turned, and when I finally laid my eyes upon that twitching flash of white, I could not breathe.
“No. You… sick… bastards…”
Hanging from my mailbox, like some demented flag of conquest, were my daughter’s panties.
The panties Sam had been wearing the day she started her first period.
Tiny, snow-white panties stained at the crotch with dried brown blood. Like the grisly evidence of some unimaginable crime.
They fluttered and billowed in the day’s cool breeze. So bright, in contrast to my ash-gray mailbox and the grass beyond it. So pale, untainted. Except where she had become a woman…
From the shadows on my front porch, my wind chimes tingled softly. Taunting me.
My knees buckled. My world seemed to tilt to one side, and I thought I might fall off.
“Jesus…”
What happened next? What ridiculous conclusions would my neighbors come to now, with the discovery of a child’s bloody underwear in my garbage?
I watched, numb, as a fly lit upon my daughter’s panties. A fat bluebottle fly drawn to the scent of her blood. It crawled along their thin elastic band, its metallic green body glistening in the sunlight like a living jewel.
My guts roiled. The air around me tasted thick, bitter.
The fly crawled downward, found what it was looking for.
For another long minute or two, I could not move. I felt paralyzed by the gravity of what this meant, this inexorable portent of troubles yet to come.
It was their message, I knew. A warning from my estranged neighbors. Their delusional way of informing me: WE’RE ON TO YOU, ANDY. YOU MAY HAVE FOOLED THE AUTHORITIES, BUT WE KNOW WHAT YOU ARE…
“You don’t know any fucking thing,” I spat. “Nothing! You miserable sons of bitches…”
I staggered over to the mailbox then, and I ripped Sam’s panties off their perch. I crumpled them into a tight little ball and shoved them into my back pocket with hands that trembled like those of a man suffering from Parkinson’s disease.
I turned, preparing to head back inside.
For the first time I noticed that the clamor of construction on Freddy Morgan’s deck across the street had ceased.
A smothering cloak of silence draped itself over Poinsettia Lane.
I did not turn in their direction, but I could feel them watching me.
All of them.
Suddenly, cleaning up the mess on my front lawn became the very least of my worries. I had to get inside. Now.
Home was a million miles away. My feet weighed a thousand pounds each. I moved in the syrupy, slow-motion gait of a nightmare as I lurched through the yard like Frankenstein’s Monster, desperate to get back inside.
Finally, I reached the steps of my front porch. They seemed to stretch heavenward, at an impossible angle, into infinity. Before I searched for the energy in my legs to climb the steps, however, I glanced back once. I do not know why. I should have known better.
I turned, and my watery gaze fell upon the house directly across the street…
Donna Dunaway stood there, behind her screen door, her face barely visible in the darkness of her foyer. I might not have noticed her at all, if not for the bright yellow maternity gown she wore. Her hands lay atop her pregnant belly, fingers splayed open.
She was staring in my direction, though I could not make out her expression.
I smiled weakly. Mouthed a silent hello. Raised a shaky hand toward the one person I prayed might be my last ally.
Please, Donna, my gesture pleaded with her, assure me that you haven’t turned your back on me too.
PLEASE…
I had always liked Donna Dunaway. She was a very plain lady, the type few men on the street would afford a second glance, but her amiable demeanor m
ade her nothing less than gorgeous to anyone who knew her. It had been such a shock to all of us when her husband, Allen, left her last spring (for one of his Monday night bowling league teammates, if you believed our neighborhood’s most percipient gossipmongers). Perhaps that was another reason I admired her so—Donna seemed determined to make it without the guy even as she waddled through her third trimester amidst the sweltering heat of summer. In a way, after my own spouse decided to leave me for greener pastures, I considered Donna and myself kindred souls.
However, when I waved to her that morning, praying she had not been tainted by the pharisaic hive-mind mentality that had infected every other resident of Poinsettia Lane… Donna Dunaway quickly stepped back out of sight.
I made a stunned grunting noise in the back of my throat as I watched her front door swing shut.
The flowery curtains in her bay window fluttered a few seconds later, as they were drawn together by two pale hands.
I felt cold. So cold.
I leapt up my steps without further hesitation. Tripped and fell twice, scraping flesh from my shins, before I made it inside.
I lost one of my flip-flops on the way, but I left it lying there on the porch. I did not dare go back to retrieve it.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“I need to talk to Detective Paul Hembry,” I said, my every breath bursting out of me in a sick, rasping wheeze. “Now.”
On the other end of the line, I could hear the static of police radios crackling and squawking every few seconds. Papers rustling, phones ringing. A man shouting something about a “Ten-Sixteen on Plymill Drive.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” the woman on the phone replied. “Detective Hembry is unavailable at the moment. If you’d like, I can connect you to his extension, and you can leave a message on his voice-mail?”
“I don’t want to talk to his voice-mail,” I said. “I want to talk to Detective Hembry.”
“Excuse me, sir,” she said, “But I just told you—”
“Put Detective Hembry on the phone. Now.”
“I don’t think I appreciate your tone, sir.”
I sighed. Took a deep breath. Tried to calm down a bit as that old cliché about honey and vinegar came to mind…
“Look,” I said. “Tell him… tell him it’s Andrew Holland. Please, ma’am? He’ll know what this is about.”
A pause. She knew too. Of course. Everyone did.
“Hold on, Mr. Holland. Detective Hembry is in a meeting, but I’ll see if I can get him on the phone.”
“Th-thank you,” I said, my voice cracking. “Thank you, ma’am.”
As I waited, a vein twitched in my forehead. I stared out the window over the sink at Norman sniffing around in the backyard, and I thought, This is what it feels like to lose your mind. Yep. This is it. I am having a nervous breakdown.
Several minutes passed.
Finally, a familiar voice said in my ear, “Detective Hembry can’t come to the phone right now. This is Detective Lieutenant Erik Norton. How can I help you?”
Shit. Norton. I hadn’t expected this.
But he would have to suffice.
I licked my dry lips, said, “Detective Norton? Andrew Holland.”
“Mr. Holland.” His voice conveyed no emotion. “What seems to be the problem?”
“I need to ask you a question,” I said.
“Yes?”
“I need to know what I can do about someone messing around in my garbage.”
“Come again?”
“I need to know if it’s against the law for someone to dig through my trash. How does that work? Legally, I mean? That’s still my private property, isn’t it?”
“Hmm,” Norton said. “What an odd question. You know, Mr. Holland, I am very busy right now—”
“They think I did it,” I said.
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“Rebecca Lanning. The girl I found. My neighbors think I did it. They think I… killed her.”
I heard him clear his throat on the other end of the line.
I waited.
“What makes you say that, Mr. Holland?”
I swallowed, took a deep breath. “This morning I woke up to find my garbage spilled all over my lawn.”
“So?” Norton said.
“They were looking for something.”
“Looking for something.”
“Yes.”
“With all due respect, Mr. Holland, it sounds to me like you’re being more than a little paranoid.”
I ran one hand through my sweaty hair. Collapsed in a chair at my kitchen table. I nearly dropped the phone. It felt heavy, too heavy. Maybe Norton was right, I realized. Because my predicament did sound ridiculous when I tried to put it into words. Like an overused plot in a thousand generic thrillers. I’ll be damned, I thought, stifling a sick chuckle that bubbled up from inside of me, I’ve become a walking cliché. Yet all of this was really happening. No matter how silly my plight appeared to someone on the outside looking in, the proof of my neighbors’ animosity toward me lay all over my driveway. On my front lawn. It was crammed in one pocket of my pajamas, like a filthy secret. It had been hanging from my mailbox, a symbol of their twisted suspicions and vile, misguided assumptions…
They truly believed I liked making little girls bleed.
“Jesus Christ,” I moaned through clenched teeth. “I thought I knew these people.”
“You’ve got to understand where I’m coming from, sir,” said Detective Norton. “For an innocent man, you do seem awfully concerned about what your neighbors think. There wasn’t anything for them to find in your garbage, correct? You’ve got nothing to hide.”
I started gnawing at my fingernails. It was a nasty habit I had kicked for a decade, but now it returned worse than ever. I didn’t know what to say. Should I tell him more, or would doing so only make matters worse? I kept thinking about Detective Norton’s questions concerning my brush with the law, about his mention of a DNA test that first day I had met him. I was free and clear now, as far as the authorities were concerned. Hembry had said it himself, and his statement was quoted by the Tribune. They had never followed through with their request for a blood sample after all. But I knew that could change at any moment. If I said the wrong thing…
“Mr. Holland?” Norton said. “They didn’t find anything, did they?”
“Yeah,” I said. “They did.”
I heard his chair squeak as he sat up in it, as he suddenly grew more attentive to my dilemma than he had been at the start of our conversation.
“It’s not what they think,” I said. “They’ve got it all wrong.”
“I’m listening.”
“Last Wednesday, my daughter was visiting. She’s eleven years old. While she was here, she… she got her first period.”
“Go on.”
“Afterwards, I threw her… bloody underwear… in the trash. It was the most innocent thing in the world, Detective. Her panties were ruined, so I threw them away. But someone… my neighbors… they dug through my garbage in the middle of the night… like fucking vigilantes… and they found them. Th-they… they found Samantha’s panties, and they… hung them up… outside… as if they had solved this whole goddamn case on their own. As if they had discovered some sort of proof… ”
“Proof of what, exactly?” Norton said.
I slammed a fist down on the tabletop, wanting to lash out at something. Someone. Anyone.
“Fuck!” I shouted into the phone. I held my head in my hands. “I can’t believe this is happening.”
Detective Norton said, “I really don’t know what to say, Mr. Holland, other than to tell you… if your neighbors are so convinced that you had something to do with Rebecca Lanning’s murder, I would think they would have reported what they found by now. I doubt they would just leave their ‘evidence’ right there for you to find.”
“Unless it was a warning.”
“What do you mean?”
“Unless they’re plan
ning to take the law into their own hands,” I said.
“I highly doubt that’s the case, sir.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“I’m assuming you missed my partner’s statement in last Thursday’s Tribune,” said Detective Norton. “It was right there in black and white, on the front page. You are not a suspect.”
“I saw it,” I said. “But I’m starting to think I’m the only one. Apparently my neighbors don’t read the Tribune. Or they’ve made up their minds already, and don’t give a shit what the police have to say.”
“Mr. Holland, I’ve worked in this business long enough to know that people believe what they see on the six o’clock news, what they read in the paper. Whether it’s the truth or not.”
“That’s precisely what I’m afraid of,” I said.
“Listen, sir—”
“Sure, they printed your partner’s statement. But a lot of damn good it did, don’tcha think, when they negate that in the next paragraph by dredging up something that happened when I was twenty years old? The media is crucifying me, Detective, in case you hadn’t noticed! Because I write horror. Because of a stupid mistake I made when I was just a fucking kid—”
Norton’s new tone indicated he was speaking to someone whose mental faculties were nil. He sounded tired, fed up: “You’ve been cleared, Mr. Holland. Beyond that, my department has no control over what the media does or does not choose to print. Your conviction is a matter of public record, in case you had forgotten. Still, despite this conspiracy you’re convinced your neighbors are plotting against you… I think if you’ll just give it time, you’ll realize that last article in the Tribune went a long way toward—”
