Three Graves Full

by Jamie Mason

  “Boyd Montgomery confessed to the two killings.”

  Relief punctured Jason’s bubble of held breath and a grateful sigh rushed out of him. He wouldn’t even have noticed it at all but for Bayard’s steady appraisal, motivating a hard stop to his contented deflation. Bayard peered another few seconds off the clock, at Jason’s face in particular. “Let me show you what we’ve got.”

  A psychologist’s dream, Jason had chosen the smaller of the two back rooms for himself, and Bayard headed toward what anyone else would have claimed for the master bedroom. Ultraviolet lamp and spray bottle in hand, he led the way. Jason made an effort not to drag his feet or breathe too loudly or do anything that would cause Bayard to look back or, God forbid, turn on the overhead light. Under well-lit examination, Jason knew his pulse would play on his skin for Bayard to see. Jason’s ears were hot enough to have him pray they weren’t glowing in the gloom.

  Bayard stopped in the doorway and waggled the unmarked bottle. “We sprayed the rooms with luminol. When I turn on this light”—he waved the flattened cylinder between them—“it’ll glow where there was blood.”

  In the murk of the close hallway, Jason couldn’t be sure the walls weren’t leaning in to the tipping point, poised to crush him. “Do we have to do this?”

  “No.” Bayard loved his dramatic pauses. “But it will go a long way to understanding what comes next. I know this is awful, but you have to remember, there’s nothing in this room that you haven’t lived with the whole time. It’s not pleasant, but it doesn’t change anything. It just makes it make sense.”

  There was a logic there that granted permission to the part of Jason’s mind that desperately wanted to peek between its fingers. “Okay.”

  Bayard stepped into the room and spritzed the floor in wide arcs. The pump squawked dry plastic rasps into the darkness, then went quiet. Bayard switched on the hand lamp.

  Jason groaned.

  “Yeah,” Bayard agreed softly.

  The room in natural lighting was bare but for some unpacked boxes and a few odds and ends that hadn’t found a place elsewhere in the house. Dust grayed the brown carpet. Jason, not having any use for a guest room, used it for storage more than anything else. As the outlet to the darkened hallway, it had been a black hole of apprehension. But in the eye-aching glow of the black light, it was a shrieking disaster. The lustrous ghost of spilled blood marked out two sprawling stains, but it was the trickles and splashes and stray splatters that sang of struggle and panic. A fragile, incandescent handprint, clear and lonely on its own, was stranded in a blank patch between the two larger stains.

  Jason’s eyes rolled, fighting to take it in and flit away at the same time. A seashell roar rose up in his ears and gave a hollow voice to the echo of ruin mapped out in the luminous swirls on the floor. He swayed and threw a hand out to the wall for reinforcement.

  Bayard had a point to make, which didn’t seem to include Jason losing it in the spare room. He took Jason’s arm and steered him out, shutting off the lamp as they cleared the threshold. He spoke quickly in the dark, over Jason’s raw breathing. “I know. Montgomery didn’t even do all that great of a job of cleaning up, once you know what to look for. Lyle got samples from the baseboards. There were even flecks of blood on the window glass that no one would have noticed.” Bayard gave Jason’s shoulder a bolstering pat. “We’re almost done.”

  After another burst of hisses from the spray bottle, Bayard flicked the switch on the UV bar again and extended his arm down the hallway. Jason, on cue, grunted dismay. Two stuttering, twining, luminescent tracks faded down the carpet toward the front entryway.

  Bayard continued, “Yeah, it’s pretty obvious what happened.” He turned the lamp off again and Jason’s eyes stung with afterglow. He reeled in the wake of the shock of having to accept that this ghost-scene had been under his feet and in between his walls all day, every day, since the moment he’d moved in. He had decided to buy the place standing in this very hallway. Standing on their blood. The dark and the quiet that Bayard allowed was a kindness.

  Jason’s personal worries had been flashbulb eclipsed, stunned into the background. His mental screen was blank except for the wailing smears and strokes of blue green that he tried hard not to know had once been red and wet. His ears rang, but for himself and his own wheelbarrowful of troubles, he was afforded a break from the tension. The selfish fear that had been zinging through him for days trickled out on gratitude once that cruel light had been extinguished. He found he could breathe again once the darkness had fallen like a curtain and hidden the evidence that begged for reconstruction in the mind; insisted on the pictures that led backward in time to a room where furtive lovers were caught unguarded.

  They’d stopped in the foyer and Bayard resumed, unruffled, “Lyle has confirmed that the size and intensity of those stains in the bedroom are consistent with what he called ‘grievous’ blood loss. So, he was a little surprised to find this.”

  The click of the button on the lamp crashed like cymbals in Jason’s ears with the simultaneous realization that Bayard had sidestepped him and had aimed the luminol into the living room, talking calmly over the slyly fizzing spout. The coffee table had been moved against the sofa, and the dark field of open floor bloomed in a vivid lightning-on-storm-cloud flash.

  “Neither of those people should have lived long enough to leave another stain like that, and anyway”—Bayard’s light-holding hand swung away toward the far end of the room, where faint glowing traces in the fibers streaked off toward the kitchen and, ultimately, as Jason well knew, the back door—“this goes off in an entirely different direction.” Bayard let the lamp dangle on its lanyard, swinging the stark shadows around the room as it swayed. He spoke into the tilting, jumping darkness between them. “This scene is very different, too. Much cleaner. Lyle thought he was going to have to pull up the carpet to get anything, but he’s thorough.” Light as a dancer, Bayard hopped onto the coffee table and waved his lamp at arm’s length. Three short bands, tightly spaced, flared from a blade on the ceiling fan.

  Jason’s legs wouldn’t buckle and he didn’t know why. His muscles turned to granite, his bones fused to steel. The bellows of his lungs worked against every effort of his brain to unplug them, and even the knocking of his heart was muted against the solid rock that he’d become under this Medusa’s spell. He was a stone and his eyes would only leave the fan blade with its three succinct, tattling marks to scan the mantel and his collection of solid, sturdy, clanking antique telephones, their coiled cords looping and dipping off the edge of the varnished plank.

  No one but Jason knew that the parade line of interesting old phones was one short. The missing one lay wrapped in an old newspaper, tied in a plastic grocery bag, and fussily layered in with household refuse in the precise middle of a large trash bag, under a year and some months of garbage at the landfill. It was safe and gone and somehow still having the last word.

  Lock-jointed and rooted to the floor as he was, Jason’s mind was still loose and fluid. His thoughts weren’t a train, but a river, rushing, slipping and eddying over memories that had brought him to this moment. He saw Harris facedown, bleeding into the living-room carpet. He saw himself disengage from the straddling perch over Harris’s back, blind with triumph and horror, clutching at the mangled phone. The broken pieces dangled and defied him as he struggled to his feet, and with the clarity of hindsight, Jason saw himself yank the pieces from the floor and could almost feel the whistle of displaced air past his cheek as the springy cord whipped toward the ceiling, just clipping the edge of the fan blade. He’d barely registered it then and had certainly never thought about it since.

  During the cleanup, Jason had toyed with the notion of burning the place to the ground. Standing next to Tim Bayard in his living room, admiring the black-lit glow of the white stripes in his handsome golf shirt, never had a man so dearly wished for a time machine and a match.

  8

  Every event is boxed in by a set
of facts; the truth as it were. There’s the what and the when of a deed; there’s where it happened and how it was done. But it’s at the why that the liar’s margin begins. It’s from this border that we launch the justifications for everything we do, and for all that we allow to be done to us. Only our distance from the hard truth and the direction of our push—toward or away from it—is the measure of our virtue.

  Gary Harris was killed by Jason Getty on the carpet of Jason’s living-room floor by repeated blows to the head from the base of an antique telephone. That’s the story. The End.

  The naked reality of this case is that one man took another man’s life, and we all know, regardless of creed, thou shalt not kill. The straight truth would have had Jason convicted and sentenced in a court of law. But even the law resides in that sloping space between truth and lies. It strives heroically for justice, the margin’s most noble construct, by allowing for the heat of passion. The law also marks, in shades of gray, the difference between reasons and excuses. So, Jason would likely have earned some small reprieve for having been shoved that night, for having been taunted and bullied in the weeks leading up to it. Maybe second-degree would have fit what he’d done, and why he’d done it.

  Perhaps most important, though, we store our memories in the liar’s margin, to cushion our conscience and to safeguard our self-esteem. Jason had been pushed, as he recalled it, well past the point that second-degree and its mandatory punishments felt in any way fair. He felt justified, and if he could have deleted that night from his life’s history, he wouldn’t have. If he’d been allowed a purge, it would have had to start back at the beginning. It would have rearranged a summer’s afternoon by three minutes.

  • • •

  Jason had not been all the way happy that day, but it had been close. Warm sun with a slightly less warm breeze set to ruffling his hair and rippling his shirt so that it tickled pleasantly against his chest and arms. This sort of day erased the memory of ever having been cold, the kind that made winter more of a concept, an abstraction, like something once read about in a book. It left him nibbling the corners off a random smile, so as not to look like an utter simpleton standing at the gas pump, grinning at the sky.

  It had taken months, but he’d come back around to a kind of contentment in his new hometown of Stillwater. It was a feat after boiling in the shame of being told that he hadn’t enough zest to him, hadn’t owned enough basic appeal to keep his wife satisfied in their life together. He’d loved Patty, loved the ease of their routine, and the radiant heat from another body in the bed with him at night. At least it had felt like love. They didn’t quarrel often. They regularly shared a laugh, and in company their conversations were stocked with private jokes. They’d always breakfasted together, with their heads behind their respective bookbindings, and, to him, their silences had been companionable, not desolate. But she’d been only hours to days from writing him off as time wasted, stranding him in shame in front of everyone.

  With her death and the consolation prize of skipping the king-size serving of humiliation, Jason wrestled a new conflict. His reaction to this sudden tragedy needed to present as pure grief. It was the only proper thing. It’s what everyone expected. He felt their eyes watching him for a performance of suffering. They leaned into his space, all ears for arias of weeping. They watched him, and he watched them as each person plucked up one of Patty’s funeral cards to hold as a souvenir to remember her by and a talisman against any misfortune of their own.

  All the attention embarrassed him. He knew, privately, that his feelings were a tad overseasoned with relief, and he couldn’t stand the thought that it might show. He didn’t enjoy the money, not that it was even all that much after the government got its bite of things, but he couldn’t entirely beat back the surges of lightness at being free to box it up and drive his life out from underneath the sympathy that he wasn’t at all sure he deserved. It felt like a win, being able to afford to leave his job and move away from his in-laws’ disapproval.

  But no one should win like that. It subtracted something from his soul and left him an amputee of sorts, very alone in the world. He was most comfortable when he was hiding his deformity from others, knowing that regular people would never feel the way he did.

  There’d been no outright confrontation, just one excruciating episode at his father-in-law’s grand banquet table two weeks after the funeral. Naturally, Patty’s father had sat at the head of the table, with the family lawyer directly to his right. When Jason had arrived, the housekeeper had inexplicably set his glass of iced tea one seat over from the first chair to the left, stranding Jason at loose ends over whether to sit there, dangling off to the side all by himself, or to slide his drink to the empty seat next to his father-in-law. He couldn’t shake the feeling that they’d left an empty space for effect, and that to fill it would leave him sitting on the ghost of his late wife’s lap.

  “What do you think she would have wanted done with her money?” her father had asked, spearing Jason straight through with eyes that sparked under sleekly combed salt-and-pepper brows.

  “What do you mean?” Jason bought a few empty beats with a useless question, but instead of stealing constructive time to think, it only afforded him a chance to plumb the depths of his discomfort.

  “She had the hospital charity that she supported here in town. And the ASPCA, maybe. She cared about animals. She had always said”—her father swallowed some hard emotion that made his cheeks burn and his eyes shine—“that she wanted one day to look into a Peace Corps tour. Maybe you could arrange a sponsorship donation in her name. That would be in line with what she would have wanted.”

  Jason was skeptical that any of these suggestions represented actual facts about his wife, but didn’t doubt for a second that she’d mentioned some or all of this to stay in the good graces of her civically minded father. She’d not been stingy, just very much a willing victim of inertia. The truth of it was that Patty, like Jason, had been content to let the clock wind circles over her intentions. That she’d let the two of them drift along for seven years before leveling with her own husband was plenty well testament to that.

  “We left everything to each other,” Jason had replied.

  “I understand that. I just wondered if you’d given any thought to what she would have wanted under the circumstances.” Her father didn’t say what those circumstances were. Nor did he need to.

  The aggressive silence flung at Jason by both other men at the table probably backfired. Their stony stares and throbbing jaw muscles scared him right out of answering them properly. Had they been less intimidating, Jason would likely have made a fool of himself, bumbling out a lame argument that their threat-sharpened legalese would have gutted. But instead, he froze, thankful that the tablecloth hid the knocking of his knees.

  “But I’m her husband,” he blurted.

  The other two men mistook his clipped succinctness for deep resolve, and knowing full well that they came from a position of statutory weakness, they wrote Jason his checks, signed him from their ranks, and all but shoved him out the door. He stood blinking on the mat, bewildered at how easy it had all actually turned out to be.

  And so he came to Stillwater. It could have been called Backwater by contrast to what he’d known, and its lack of grandeur made him feel safe because it put him comfortably out of path-crossing distance of his in-laws’ snobbery. He needn’t have worried that his erstwhile father-in-law would have sought him out. He wouldn’t have and, in fact, undertook a thorough effort to erase Jason Getty from every detail of his life, right to the threshold of where the memories of his daughter would allow.

  Ultimately, it would have been better for Jason to have undone, rather than simply lengthen, the apron strings to his original hometown. He stayed within an hour’s drive of the house he’d grown up in, the church he’d been married in, and his in-laws’ grand Tudor, which had always underscored his own meagerness.

  All on his own for the first time in
almost a decade, cycles of numbness and loneliness were shot through with manic industry and giddy freedom until Jason took a job just to parcel out his time for him. Routine settled his nerves, and predictable human contact forced his loneliness into the darker corners of the night when he’d run out of interesting television and munchies. He’d thought about getting a dog.

  That’s what he’d been thinking about at the gas pump that day: What breed would suit him? He imagined unlikely strings of days just like this one, getting fit and tanned through hours of romping on the lawn or in the park. A big, loping hound, maybe. Or a small, feisty one with an aura of energy to draw on. Definitely one that would lie snuffling at his feet in the forlorn space in the evening between being tired, but not yet asleep. A dog for whom Jason would always be enough.

  He hadn’t paid much notice to the motorcycle that pulled up to the opposite pump, but couldn’t help noting the avid “Fuck!” coming from the dismounted rider. Craning his eyes to their limits in order to gawk without looking like he was gawking, Jason watched the man strut a perimeter of rage around the bike. He ripped at the catches on the saddlebags and scrabbled up to the elbow through the odds and ends inside them.

  The man yanked a cell phone from one pouch and, after dialing, yelled a blue streak into it. “It’s unfuckingbelievable! My wallet must have fallen out at Heather’s. . . . She’s at fucking work now. . . . No, I don’t know . . . and I’ve got seventeen fucking cents! . . . I’m on fumes, man. I’m never going to make it. . . . Don’t give me shit! Like I need that right now. . . . Well, don’t sell it without me . . . do not . . . I’m fucking serious, man . . . I’ll kick your ass. . . . Okay. . . . Fine. . . . Yeah, I’ll figure it out.” Then he laughed like the sun jumping out suddenly, as it sometimes does, from behind black storm clouds. “Shut the fuck up. . . . I’ll be there as soon as I can.” Another laugh. “You’re a prick.”