by Alex Dolan
Holy shit, I was fucked.
The soft mound of black and white fur scampered back into the living room and sniffed around Leland’s feet. “What the hell is this?”
Tesmer said, “It’s not even her dog.”
“She brought a dog?”
“She said its name is Emmanuel.”
Leland asked, “Did you steal this?”
“I borrowed it from a shelter.”
“Pathetic.”
“Exactly,” Tesmer added.
Emmanuel got the hint that Leland Moon wouldn’t play with him and romped over to Veda. Their son moved for the first time since he’d come inside. He squatted and stroked the dog. Cuteness aside, playing with the puppy was one way to withdraw from whatever his parents had going on in their home. Emmanuel flopped on his back, and Veda gratefully stroked his stomach.
Tesmer warned, “We’re not keeping it.”
The dog gave Veda some courage to speak up. He nodded at me. “Who this is?”
“Don’t worry about her. It’ll be all right,” his father said.
“She’s here because of me, right?” Apparently, Cindy Coates hadn’t spoken to Veda. When the threat arose, she’d called the parents instead.
His mother echoed, “It’s all right, Veda.”
With no answers from his parents, Veda addressed me. “Why are you here?”
I admired this. First impressions what they were, I didn’t think he’d have the fortitude to speak to me directly.
I partially fibbed to win him over. “You’re not the reason I’m here—your dad is. Ultimately, I was trying to find him.”
“Why? Who are you?”
Leland interrupted, “She’s a criminal, Veda. One of the ones who got away. It was my mistake, and we’re going to fix that now.”
“But this has something to do with me, right?” His parents didn’t answer, which told him what he needed to know. “Then I want to talk to her.” Veda walked past his mom’s armchair and stood by the drawn shades, turning our weird little triangle into a square.
Leland and Tesmer traded eyebrow semaphore. They’d been together long enough that they could communicate without words. When they’d reached a nonverbal agreement, Leland asked me, “Are you carrying a weapon?” Then to Tesmer: “Did you check for a weapon?” Tesmer hadn’t.
“I don’t have a weapon.” This was true.
“Are you going to do anything stupid?” he asked.
I looked around the room and marveled at having landed myself in this pickle. “Stupider than this?”
He wasn’t as easy with his grins now that I was in his home. “I’m asking if you’ll do anything that will make use shoot you. Do you want to get shot?”
“Of course I don’t.”
“Then we’re going to have dinner.”
Because of the burned fish, Tesmer heated up leftover stew with gamey beef. The parents sat at the ends of the table, and I sat across from Veda. A dim overhead hung like a pool table chandelier, casting deep shadows under all of us. Leland removed his suit jacket but wore his shoulder holster—I assumed he would have unstrapped for a regular meal. Tesmer’s revolver glistened within reach on a side table.
Veda reached to either side for his parents’ hands, and then bowed his head.
“Grace—tonight?” Leland asked.
“Especially tonight,” said Veda. He sounded like he might have been pranking all of us, but I went with it. Tesmer and Leland looked like they were humoring their child.
We held hands séance style. I had to hold hands with Tesmer and Leland. The last time I’d touched Leland’s hand, I thought he was dying of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. His talons sunk into me like he was trying to wrench apart a wishbone. Veda kept his eyes shut; sparing himself the vile looks I traded with his father.
“Lord, we gratefully accept your bounty tonight and welcome an unexpected guest—”
“An uninvited guest,” Tesmer aired.
Veda corrected, “An unexpected guest, which tests our hospitality. We pray that we can share this meal in kindness, without incident. Amen.”
“Amen,” Tesmer and I said.
Leland was quiet. We let go of each other as soon as we could. As I prepared to pick up a utensil, another hand grabbed me. Reaching from across the table, Veda had latched onto my wrist had, the way Helena Mumm had grabbed me. He gave me a penetrating stare, and turned my hand over to study the cuts and bruises on my wrist and invited me to inspect his old, self-inflicted scars, running lengthways, streaked across the underside of his forearm. He meant business when he’d cut deeply along the vessels. They’d faded into raised stripes just a shade off from his skin. He looked into my eyes as if we were the only two in the room.
Disquietingly, his voice changed when he spoke, from a deep adult timbre into a boy’s pitch and tone. Veda Moon was affecting the voice of a prepubescent child, imbued with false innocence. In this mocking voice, he asked me, “Want to share stories?”
His parents were repulsed in the same way prudes react to the punch line of a dirty joke. Tesmer admonished, “Don’t use that voice!” Leland pushed away from the table. “Your father hates that voice.”
Leland almost shivered. “The baby voice. I keep telling you not to do that voice, Veda—creeps the Holy Spirit out of me.”
Veda released my hand before I knew what was happening. When he spoke again, he used his regular baritone. “Just messing with you.” His initial fear had been replaced with the sort of semiserious petulance of a kid who just grew out of his tweens and wanted to put one over on adults every chance he got. I got the impression Veda Moon might have been a pain in the ass.
Turned out Tesmer wasn’t much of a cook. We might have been better off with the charred fish filets. The beef didn’t taste any better than it smelled. She’d thrown too much orzo into the mix, and it sucked up all the broth. We were left with stringy beef porridge. I spooned up the carrots and celery, spooned because none of us had forks. We used stainless steel sporks, the spoon-fork combination utensil customarily employed by boy scouts. These were high-end sporks, specially selected with a brushed finish. The prongs had no depth, and I’d have had a tough time spearing the beef if I’d tried. I remembered the fork scars Helena Mumm had given Cindy Coates. I didn’t see scars on Veda Moon, but suspected forks might be an emotional trigger for him.
Veda’s baby voice had freaked out his parents more than me, and no one spoke for a bit. I had no idea what their normal dinner chat was like, but it couldn’t have been this icy. Utensils clinked in silence. Emmanuel played under the table, and his tail swatted against my ankles. The dog gobbled his portion of stew from a cereal bowl, and assuredly appreciated it more than me.
I couldn’t take the silence. “You registered me as a sex offender?”
Tesmer’s spork clanged on her plate, even though she wasn’t the one I addressed. Leland didn’t stop eating. “We had a trade, and you welched on your end. Welcome to the consequences.”
“What were you making her do?” Veda asked.
“Never mind,” said Tesmer.
“I know about your trades,” he said to his father. “Why were you trading with her?” He was still trying to figure me out. “Who is she?”
“She’s a killer, son,” Leland said with a leave it alone tone.
“Who did she kill?”
“A lot of people.”
“Is that true?” Veda asked me.
I didn’t answer him.
Without making a show of it, Veda rubbed his fingers on his napkin to wipe off my cooties. “And you made a trade with her?”
Neither of his parents responded. This was my chance to get a word in. “When we met, your father told me his name was Leland Mumm. He claimed he was Helena Mumm’s brother.”
Veda was a bright kid—he put it together quickly. He would know that Helena Mumm had been released from prison. He probably even knew where she was living.
“You told me you weren’t going to go a
fter her.”
“Technically, we weren’t.” A naked lie.
“You were going to kill her.” Veda gestured to me with his spork. “You were going to get this woman to kill her.”
Tesmer tried to soothe her son. “Nothing happened.”
I couldn’t stop now. The best chance I had of getting out of there was wooing their son over to my side. “Helena is still alive because I refused to kill her.”
Leland said to his son, “Helena is dying as it is. She has a few weeks. We had a small window of opportunity to get to her while she was out of prison and before she was in the ground. We took it.”
Veda snuffled at his father with palpable contempt. He seemed more interested in me, and looked up and down my arms, possibly comparing my musculature to his own. “Are you some kind of assassin?”
“No.”
“Why didn’t you kill her?”
“Because she didn’t want to die,” I said simply.
Leland finally introduced me. “Veda, this is Pamela Wonnacott.” Until that moment, I had been nameless to their son. “She kills the old and sick, because she thinks she’s putting them out of their misery.”
I didn’t defend myself. Either someone was going to understand what I did, or they weren’t. I didn’t want to risk alienating Veda Moon by trying to rationalize my work.
Leland added, “She goes by Kali when she kills people.”
Veda absorbed what his father told him. He remarked, “Your fake name sounds more normal than your real name. Does it mean something?”
“It’s a Hindu goddess. My parents were in theater. The apple didn’t fall far.”
“Were they actors?”
“Musicians. My mom sang for the opera. My dad was a composer.”
Maybe the kid was asking me questions just to antagonize his parents. Bonding with me marginalized them.
“Are you a musician?”
“I have my dad’s piano—but I can only noodle a little.”
“Both of your parents are dead,” Veda stated more than asked. Not that it took a genius, but he had picked up on the past tense. Bright kid. “Can I ask how?” Veda’s face had the emotional expressiveness of a glacier. He could have been pranking me again. Maybe he’d put on that creepy baby voice to mess with me. But he might have been interested in learning about me.
I didn’t talk about my parents to many people. Some of the guys at the firehouse knew some of it, but even they didn’t know the full story. The guys I dated sure as hell didn’t know any of it—sometimes I even lied on dates and told them my parents were happily married in Chapel Hill, even though I’ve never been to North Carolina.
There at the Moons’ table, I opened up to a judgmental bunch to win their sympathy. Anything to get me out of there. “My dad was creamed by a car while he was walking across the street. Nothing spectacular. Just a traffic accident.”
“Drunk driver?”
“Just a moron who wasn’t paying attention.” As casual as I tried to be, this brought up some bitterness.
“How old were you?”
“Eleven.” Not true. I was ten. But Walter Gretsch and Helena Mumm had taken Veda Moon three weeks after his eleventh birthday. I was desperate to curry favor.
“What about your mom?”
My guts knotted, having to tell a story that I never gave volume. Leland studied me academically to see what I’d do. The way Leland looked at me, I could tell he’d already found out on his own. Tesmer looked as if she knew what I was going to say as well. It was like both of them were waiting for a favorite line in a movie seen a hundred times; they wanted to hear me say it. They didn’t save me with a, “Let’s talk about something else,” sort of interruption. I hadn’t expected compassion, but they let me squirm.
“My mother died in a fire.” I choked on the words.
“Two accidents,” Veda noted impassively. “Strange.”
I could have let it drop, but with Leland and Tesmer glaring like lighthouse Fresnels, I explained through a tight jaw, “The fire wasn’t an accident. My mother remarried a man named Gordon Ostrowski. Gordon was an arsonist. He burned the house down.” My masseter muscle felt like it might cramp. I didn’t want to cry in front of these people, but my nose dripped. All those emotions that I fought daily to repress were issuing out like volcanic fissures, a twitch here and a cramp there.
Veda said, “But you lived.” This could have been intended as a comfort or accusation—impossible to tell from his tone.
My eyes watered. In my mind I literally begged him to stop talking. Please no more.
“Were you hurt?”
My hands were shaking. Why won’t you stop? Now came the part I hadn’t told anyone. No one. Not my closest comrades. Not my therapist. Only the police would have known, because they questioned me right after it happened. Leland and Tesmer might not have known this part. My deepest shame. And by that, I mean the deepest shame of my life. And here I was in front of these people I didn’t like or know, and I couldn’t hold it in. It poured out of me. “I wasn’t there. I ran away from home and left my mother alone with that man.”
When I was fourteen years old, Gordon scared me enough to walk out. I tried to convince my mother that he was dangerous, that we should leave him. When she wouldn’t come with me, I protested, then stuffed a camping duffel and stayed at a hostel for two days. I hoped she’d get the message that it was either me or Gordon at that point. Maybe she even got the message. She wasn’t able to tell me.
I never saw the house on fire—not in person. I never saw my mom carried out to the ambulance. Those photos I had to find in the paper and online like everyone else. When I came home, all I found was the house in ruins. The smell of smoke still hung in the air. Saying it aloud there with the Moons meant I had to relive that moment of smelling ash in the air, the moment my body knew that catastrophe had happened before my mind could think it.
It was July and too warm for fireplaces. I only smelled a tinge when I was a few blocks away, then it grew more pungent, downright skunky when I turned onto my street. Our house had been a cozy Tudor; a style I appreciate now but took for granted at fourteen. The space where the house stood was just a space. The absence of the building seemed like a hazy mirage. At some point I dropped my runaway bag and tore down the street until I reached what remained of the foundation. Within the ashen pit, black beams toppled on each other like pickup sticks.
I could no longer compose myself at the Moons’ dinner table. I collapsed on my forearms and wept. I needed to be someplace private, but when I rose to leave the table, Tesmer retrieved the gun. “Sit down, please.” I despised them all in that moment, but I wasn’t strong enough to put up a fight. I squatted back down on my seat and cried into my hands, hiding my face from the family. They all observed me.
Veda was the first to speak. “My name’s Sanskrit.” He wasn’t good at small talk.
I snorted. “I know. It means ‘knowledge.’”
Veda shifted attention back to his father. “Why didn’t you just go after Helena yourself?”
“Because he’d get caught,” I answered softly. To add some sand in the ointment, I said to Leland, “You never talked to him about any of this.”
Tesmer pinched her spork stem like a dart. “This isn’t your issue.”
“It sure as hell is now.”
“She’s got a point there,” said Veda. “Why would you bring someone else into this? What were you thinking?” I wiped my eyes with the napkin. It was fascinating seeing a son claim the moral high ground over his parents. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you don’t like talking about it,” his mother said. “And I don’t blame you. But it’s our job as parents to protect you. That’s how it works.”
“Protect me from who? Helena Mumm? Too late!” He laughed bitterly.
“This was our chance to make good,” said Leland.
“By killing her?”
“Would you really care if she died?” Tesmer asked.
“I would care if you were caught. I’d care that my parents had killed someone,” Veda said. “I don’t want Helena Mumm or Walter Gretsch in my life. I don’t want to think about them. God, it makes me sick. It’s like you’ve brought them into our house.” Some emotion surfaced—maybe fury. I couldn’t identify it. “What was this supposed to do for me now? How does this help me now?”
Something washed over his face—uncertainty, maybe even embarrassment. He sank in his chair, his expression suddenly vulnerable, like he’d woken up nude in a classroom. At first I didn’t know what had happened. The dog reacted to it before the rest of us, trotting from under the table with a clipped whine.
Veda bolted up from his seat, and his chair tumbled onto the floor. His hands played fig leaves, but they couldn’t hide it. He’d urinated. The khaki fabric around his crotch had soaked through in a wide patch. Neither parent looked surprised. Their son marched out of the room, and Leland simply tossed his napkin onto his dinner plate, signaling the meal had ended. The ammonia stench finished off an already unpalatable meal.
With his son out of earshot, Leland said, “That’s what he does now. He pisses himself. He lives with us because he doesn’t know how to make it on his own. He can’t hold down a job. He can seem like he’s in control, but he’s got triggers. And if those triggers are pulled, he’ll crumble right in front of you.” He pushed his plate away and folded his hands as if he wanted to pray. “You think because he’s the one who got taken, he’s the only one with a say in this. You’re wrong.”
Down the hall, Emmanuel’s collar jangled into what I assume was Veda’s room. It sounded like they were playing together.
Leland got up to walk his plate and spork into the kitchen. Tesmer stayed at the table in case I got the urge to run. From the kitchen he called, “Do you drink beer or wine?”
I looked to Tesmer. “We’re drinking now?”
She tossed her napkin on her own plate, covering her food like a morgue shroud. “We are. So what is it?”
“Beer.”
