by John Inman
“You’re a two-edged sword, Sam. You make me happy, and you make me sad.”
Sam’s voice was lazy. He tilted his head to look up at my face when he spoke. His lips moved languidly against my breast, his breath warm and soothing on my skin. “Don’t ask me to leave,” he whispered. “I’ll beat you up if you do.”
I laughed and pulled him closer. “No. I won’t ask you to leave. I want you here forever.”
“Good,” he sighed. “That’s what I want too. But why do I make you sad?”
“You know why. I have an unshakeable feeling that loving you is going to cost me dearly.” He started to jerk away, but I held him in place. “Don’t get me wrong. It’s a price I’m willing to pay. But there’s going to be sadness and heartbreak before this is all over. For me, for you, for Timmy, for everyone. You know that, don’t you.” It wasn’t a question; it was a statement of fact, and Sam didn’t argue about it.
“Yes,” he said. “I know. But we’re adults, Jason. We can handle the sorrow without it tearing us apart. I know we can. We have to. And as for Timmy, as horrible as the truth about his father may end up being, I think he has a right to know what it is. At whatever the cost, the truth has to come out. For Paul’s sake, if no one else’s. You understand that, don’t you? It’s a matter of right and wrong. A matter of truth and lies.”
I stroked his hair, as happy and as sad as I had ever been in my life. Just as I had told him I was. “It’s also about revenge, I think.”
Sam raised himself onto his elbow and studied my face. His movement tilted the hammock alarmingly. We had to do a frantic little balancing act to get it back on an even keel. “Not revenge, Jason. Justice. Things need to be made right. We owe my brother that much. He was a good person. He didn’t deserve what happened to him.”
“And what was that?” I asked, knowing full well what his answer would be because I knew it was the truth as well as Sam did. Even Timmy knew the truth, although I doubted if he had worked out the ramifications of it all. He would not have been playing on his trike if he had. He would have been up in his room crying his eyes out. Weeping for what was lost. Or what was about to be lost.
Sam dipped his head and kissed my shoulder before he spoke. His hand slid over my stomach, and I felt a surge of desire that should have been nowhere within a hundred miles of us at that moment.
He lowered his voice even more, making sure Timmy wouldn’t hear a word of what he was uttering. “Paul was murdered here, Jason. You know it’s true. He didn’t run away from his wife. He didn’t abandon his son. He died. He died in violence. He died in violence at the hands of someone he knew. Someone he trusted. No one should die that way. His death needs to be avenged. I have to try to make things right. I can’t let this rest. I just can’t. He was my brother, and I loved him.”
I looked away, into the treetop above our heads. There was a finch up there somewhere, singing its heart out. The music sounded out of place. “Just like I love my sister,” I said.
“Yes. Just like that, Jason. And I think we’re both going to know loss before this is over. I hope you’re ready for it. I hope you understand that it has to be this way.”
“I do,” I whispered back. “But I can still hope you’re wrong.”
Sam stroked a fingertip over my lips. “Of course you can. We can all hope for that. But I don’t think it’s going to happen.”
I closed my eyes, soothed by the sensation of his fingertip brushing my mouth. I tried to block out the thoughts that were tearing through my mind. But they couldn’t be blocked. They were unstoppable.
“Neither do I, Sam.”
“Then we’ll just have to make the best of it. For that boy over there. All right? Please don’t let it make you stop loving me.”
I opened my eyes at those words, studying his face. His eyes were the saddest I had ever seen them. They were glistening with coming tears.
I lifted my head and tried to kiss the tears away, stop them in their tracks. “Never,” I said. “I’ll never stop loving you. No matter what happens.”
Reality came bursting back into both our heads at the same time. Timmy was being too quiet. Where the hell was he and what was he up to?
Sam and I jerked our way up to a sitting position, again shifting the hammock perilously close to dumping us out on the ground. We craned our necks, looking around. With a sigh of relief, we spotted him once again at the edge of the house, down on his hands and knees with his tricycle overturned beside him, where he had dumped it. He was peering into the little basement window on the east side of the house. It was one of the windows overlooking the place where we had been working. The hellhole, as I was beginning to think of it. When we held our breath, we could hear Timmy muttering words into the glass. They were too faint to understand.
“Look at him,” Sam said. “Conversing with the dead. What a kid, huh?”
At that moment, the love I felt for this man beside me and the boy across the yard filled my heart all in a rush, almost making me gasp. Something else filled my heart as well.
Fear. Icy stark fear. A premonition.
“We have to watch him closely tonight, Sam. Something’s going to happen. I can feel it.”
Sam laid his hand over my pounding heart as if he could sense it thundering inside me. “Don’t worry. We’ll watch him. His father is watching him too. Nothing will happen to Timmy. None of us will let him come to any harm.”
I turned away from the boy and studied Sam’s calm face, so certain, so fearless. There was so much love in his eyes at that moment I thought I couldn’t bear to look at them.
“You be careful too,” I said. “Don’t let anything happen to you. Please, Sam. Be careful tonight, okay? I don’t know why, but… I’m scared. Scared for all of us.”
He grinned and chucked me lightly under the chin. “Never fear. I’m with you forever. I’m indestructible, love. And Timmy? Nothing can hurt that kid. Not with you and me and his father watching out for him. Trust me, Jason. I’ll stay safe. It’s the only way I can be with you. I’ll do nothing to jeopardize that.”
I wondered if Paul ever said the same words to Sally.
WE DRAGGED my recliner from the study and lugged it down the basement stairs for Timmy to sit on while we worked. We planned to move the big chunks of concrete and dig under those tonight. There was also the added benefit that on the recliner, Timmy would be comfortable and maybe even be able to sleep while we worked. We could have him with us as long as possible, all the better to keep an eye on him.
The evening didn’t cool off much with the setting of the sun, but it was better than the afternoon. We opened the security door leading out to the backyard and prayed a breeze would find its way into the basement. Sam and I wore our work clothes again. The same filthy tennis shoes and beat-up shorts we had worn the night before. We figured they were pretty well ruined anyway.
Like Timmy’s after his ordeal with the hockey stick, our hands were still sore from wielding the tools the night before. The gloves we wore made the pain almost bearable. Timmy had a giggling fit when Sam and I argued about which tools we would use. I wanted the shovel, but Sam didn’t want the pick.
Finally, Timmy marched over to us with a scowl on his face, waving an accusatory finger around like a loaded gun while Thumper hung draped over his other arm like a melted candle. “If you boys can’t be nice, I’m not going to let you play together anymore!” he railed, for all the world like a worn-out mother down to her last ounce of patience. Then he burst out laughing. Sam and I rolled our eyes and went back to work. I got the shovel.
We had no way of knowing the longest night of our lives was about to begin.
Chapter 14
I CAME to the conclusion early on during the second evening of digging up my basement floor that physical labor was not for me. I hated being sweaty and dirty, and I despised having every muscle and tendon in my body twanging like an overtightened guitar string. What I wanted to do was bathe, tuck Timmy into bed, and spend the r
est of the night ravaging Sam’s scrumptious body—and maybe coercing him into doing a little ravaging of mine as well. But that didn’t seem to be happening anytime soon.
So we dug. And while we dug, Timmy once again took up his coloring book and colored. As the night deepened, the air grew sultrier. Off in the distance, I could hear a grumble of thunder from flashes of lightning stuttering on the horizon. Somewhere out there a storm was brewing, but it wouldn’t reach the city. It was too far away. The house hunkered over us as still as death, heavy with anticipation, or so I imagined it to be.
When we could dig no more because every area had already been potholed by our tools, we tackled the pile of rubble in the corner where Timmy had sat the night before. We laboriously hefted or rolled large chunks of concrete to an area where we had already dug. It must have been the old concrete that was taken up from the basement floor outside the brick wall just prior to the new floor being laid. I couldn’t imagine why Paul hadn’t just hauled it away instead.
Some of the pieces were so large it took Sam and me both to lift them. We grunted our way through the pile, one chunk at a time, sweating, griping, cursing.
Two hours later, our hands aching, our legs trembling with exhaustion, Sam and I needed a break. We had sweated buckets. My back was wailing in misery, and a rock had worked its way inside my ruined tennis shoe and was driving me crazy. Timmy had dozed off in the recliner almost an hour ago, Thumper at his side. He had probably grown bored listening to us bitch.
One of the happiest moments in my life was when Sam tapped me on the shoulder and sawed an imaginary line across his throat, signaling we should quit for a while.
The bricked-off area of my basement was beginning to look like a lunar landscape, with upturned rills of dirt tossed haphazardly around. The floor lamp standing in the middle of this wasteland looked totally out of place—rather like a naked store mannequin standing in the middle of a freshly plowed field.
With the pile of rubble moved from the corner and redeposited onto the already-dug earth, we had a whole new area of unscored ground to excavate.
But not yet.
Sam and I quietly tiptoed past Timmy, so as not to wake him, and dragged ourselves through the open security door and up the steps to the backyard. We plopped down in the grass, enjoying the cooler air outside, although there wasn’t much of a breeze to brag about. A gibbous moon glared overhead, looking lopsided and strange. The stars were bright, Venus positively glowing. I could smell my orange tree and roses on the evening air. Night birds were fluttering in the eaves, disturbed by our presence, maybe, or by the flashes of lightning off in the distance. Miles away, somewhere in the city, a siren wailed. As I always do when I hear a far-off siren, I muttered a quick thank-you heavenward that it wasn’t wailing for me or mine.
If Sam and I had not been doing what we were doing, namely digging up my basement for human remains, it would have been a lovely evening. But somehow that “human remains” thing knocked the loveliness right out of it.
We closed our eyes, breathed in the night air, and relaxed our weary muscles. As worn out as we were, Sam’s hand still came out of the darkness beside me and laid itself over mine. I smiled and opened my eyes to that stunningly odd moon shining over our heads. Sam’s next words knocked the smile off my face.
“Still feel like something bad is going to happen?”
I was a bit snippy with my answer. Attempting to unearth dead bodies always does that to me.
“Yes.”
Sam tried not to grin. I think he found my recalcitrance charming. Go figure. “It’ll be all right, Jason. Trust me.”
My heart softened just looking at him in the moonlight. I made a concerted effort not to be such a horse’s ass. It took me a minute. Self-restraint is not my forte. “I do, Sam,” I said. “I do trust you. It’s the rest of the world I don’t trust.”
For that, Sam didn’t seem to have an argument.
As much to change the subject as anything else, I said, “We’d better go check on Timmy. He’s being awfully quiet in there.”
“He was asleep,” Sam soothed. “You worry too much.”
“And you don’t worry enough,” I said. “Blink your eyes and that kid could tricycle his way to Prague. Let’s go.”
It was a good thing we did.
We found Timmy sitting at the edge of our newly rearranged pile of shattered concrete. Thumper, as loyal as ever, sat in the dirt before him, staring up at Timmy’s face with her head cocked to the side. Timmy was perched on one of the larger concrete chunks that it had taken both Sam and I considerable effort to move. His bare feet were in the dirt and his elbows were on his knees. He was staring at something in his hand. Something small and white. I could see it glistening in the light from the floor lamp in the corner.
Timmy turned at the sound of our footsteps. He had tears in his eyes.
“Timmy?” Sam said. “What’s wrong?”
The boy held his tiny hand out to us, clenched in a fist. “Lookit,” he said.
I stepped closer and dropped to my knees in front of him. “What have you got?” I asked. “Show me. Open your hand. It’s not another bug, is it?”
Timmy shook his head.
Sam squatted beside me and reached out to wipe the tears from Timmy’s cheeks with his bandanna. “What did you find?” he asked gently. “And why are you crying?”
Timmy sucked in a shivering breath of air. His chin trembled. “Daddy was hurt here. Daddy was hurt bad.”
I ran my hand over Timmy’s shorn hair, trying to comfort him. “What do you mean?”
And he opened his fist. “Lookit,” he said again. “Look what I found in the dirt. It was shining in the dark. I thought it was a diamond.”
Sam and I gazed at the object lying on Timmy’s dusty palm. It was a tooth. A human tooth.
“My God—” Sam didn’t finish the sentence. I guess he figured it didn’t need finishing.
The crowbar we had found flashed in my mind. The fucking crowbar.
I tried to pluck the tooth from Timmy’s hand, but he quickly pulled back and wrapped it safely inside his tiny fist again. “It’s mine,” he said. “It belonged to Daddy. That makes it mine.”
I tried to give him a reassuring smile and bury my own fear at the same time. “You’re right. I’m sorry. It is yours, and no one else’s. But tell us where you found it. Can you do that?”
Sam squeezed up close to me, both of us staring intently at the boy. “Yes,” Sam said, “tell us exactly where you found it. Please, Timmy. It’s important.”
Timmy pointed to the unturned ground in the corner. It was the spot from where we had moved the broken slabs of concrete. The only place we hadn’t dug.
“There,” he said. Another tear skittered down Timmy’s cheek. “I think—”
“What,” Sam asked, groaning his way to his feet. “What do you think?”
I stood with him. We were too tired to squat for long. Our legs were too sore. Together we waited for Timmy to answer.
Clutching the tooth in his fist, and holding his fist to his heart, Timmy gazed up at each of us in turn. First Sam, then me. The house stood silent above our heads, as if as eager to hear what Timmy had to say as we were.
Dropping his eyes from us, Timmy turned and stared down at the ground where he had pointed. “I think Daddy’s still there,” he said in a hoarse whisper, fighting back a sob. “I think that’s where he sleeps. All alone in the dirt. I think… that’s why he’s sad.”
My pulse thundered in my head. I stared at the unchurned earth at my feet. Sam watched me, wondering what I was going to say, what I was going to do. I had no choice. There was only one option. We would have to dig. We would have to dig and dig until we solved this mystery once and for all. But not with Timmy here. No way.
We would have to put him to bed first.
Without consulting Sam, I scooped Timmy into my arms. “Come on, kiddo. It’s time for bed.”
Timmy seemed exhausted. He didn’t e
ven argue. He simply nodded and reached out his arms for Thumper. Sam lifted the dog and placed her in the boy’s arms.
“Come on,” Sam said, his hand on Timmy’s shoulder, his eyes burning into mine, filled with sympathy and sorrow—and excitement. God forgive me, but I think that same sense of excitement was burning in my eyes too. We were about to learn the truth, and we both knew it. It was all we could do to hide our exhilaration from Timmy.
But while there was exhilaration, for me there was also fear. Fear of the truths we were about to unearth. Literally. If Timmy’s father was indeed buried in the ground at our feet, then who had put him there? And how could it be anything but wrongful death?
Murder. How could it be anything but murder?
Lost in our separate thoughts, we carried Timmy up the stairs, through the ground floor of the house, and up the second flight of stairs to Sam’s bedroom. Just like Bugs Bunny told us to do.
God, I hoped I would never have to explain that Bugs Bunny part to the police.
I pulled off Timmy’s trousers and shirt and tucked him into Sam’s bed in his Marvin the Martian undershorts, dirty feet and all. I rattled off a litany of nonsensical words while I smoothed the sheet over him and laid Thumper at his side. “You’re on vacation, kid. You get the night off from tooth-brushing and butt-scrubbing and pajama-wearing and all that other stuff you usually have to do. You’re tired. You can barely hold your eyes open. Sam and I are going to do some work downstairs. You sleep. Everything will look better in the morning. Thumper’s here to protect you, all right?”
Timmy nodded, his eyes heavy. He still clutched the tooth in his hand. I didn’t mention it, and neither did he. So I let it stay where it was, wrapped snugly and lovingly in his warm little hand.
Tears sparkled in Timmy’s crystal-blue eyes yet again. A dimple appeared in his chin as he fought the urge to cry. “Will Daddy be okay?”
