by Ivan Blake
“Did he say where he was going?”
“Back to Portland I think, and after that I’m not sure.”
“Did he say anything about Vermont?”
“He might have, but you’d have to ask Nigel Harrow. He was making arrangements for Chris.”
“I plan to, but you don’t know where in Vermont he might be staying?”
“Again, speak to Mr. Harrow.”
“When you got to the bus station, did you stay with him?”
“No. I dropped him off and drove home.”
“Can you prove that?”
“Yes. My friend Madelyn was waiting for me. She’ll tell you.”
“So when you dropped Chandler off, did he tell you he planned to see Ed Balzer?”
“No. He said he was going to write a letter to his mother while he waited for the bus.”
“What kind of mood was he in?”
“We’d had an argument.”
“About what?”
“I wanted him to stay in Bemishstock, to live with us. We’d help him get better, and finish his courses.”
“But he said no.”
“He said he wanted to get away from the press, that he needed some quiet after fourteen months in detention.”
“Did you see him get on the bus?”
“No.”
“When he left you, how did he seem?”
“Sad, very frail.”
“Could he have been carrying any weapons?”
“No, of course not! Just a backpack and small suitcase.”
“So he didn’t pick up maybe a knife or an axe at your place?”
“No, absolutely not! But why would you possibly suspect Chris of hurting Balzer? He couldn’t…even if he wanted to.”
“Because he didn’t catch the bus until six p.m., because he had plenty of time to attack Balzer if someone helped him.”
“Okay, so if he caught a later bus, maybe he just walked around town, or maybe he wrote several letters.”
“Or maybe he made good on his threats against Balzer.”
“No, that’s not possible, not in his condition. He couldn’t hurt anyone.”
“Like he couldn’t hurt Meath? Or terrorize half the South Portland Detention Center? Some people think Chandler’s harmless, that he’s a victim, and yet a lot of people who’ve gotten close to him have been hurt. Somehow it seems like he doesn’t have to raise a finger, and people get hurt anyway. Can you explain that? It’s like he has some kind of help…from a close friend or something.”
“What are you suggesting?”
Pike didn’t reply. Instead he changed tact. “You never really explained what you were doing at the Meaths’ farm the night they died, or if you played some part in their deaths. Me? I think you did...and so did Chief Boucher.”
Gillian glared at Pike for a moment, then spoke with such malice in her voice. “I shouldn’t have to remind you, Chief Pike, that what happened to Meath is out of your hands now. The Attorney General has taken the matter away from your department.” Gillian decided to turn the interrogation around. “But about Chief Boucher, is it true he died of AIDS? So does that mean he was gay? Like Mr. Duncan? You and Boucher were very close, weren’t you?”
Ricky stared at her, his face getting redder by the moment. “You can go now,” he said quietly.
Gillian smiled sweetly and left the room. “I think you can have your office back now,” she said to the acting principal. He seemed surprised that she was leaving without a police escort.
On the outside, Gillian may have appeared composed, but on the inside, she was in a fury. Of course she was angry at the police and the school, but she was also angry at Chris. Why hadn’t he told her what he’d planned? Balzer deserved everything Mallory had done to him, but Chris had deliberately kept her in the dark about his intentions. Okay, so she understood he’d been trying to protect her, but didn’t he realize by now he didn’t have to fight every battle alone? She was perfectly capable of doing her share. Look how she’d handled Pike, for God’s sake!
She’d already missed most of her first class so there was no point going now, besides, she needed air. As Gillian headed for the door, someone called after her, “Cops finally figure out whose side you’re on?”
“Excuse me?” she turned to some girl leaning against a locker.
“You sure as hell aren’t any friend of this town, bitch,” the girl lashed out. “Hero, my ass. You’ve been helping Chandler all along. All you’ve ever wanted was to destroy Bemishstock. You, and that old hooker friend of yours, and Chandler.”
“Sure, an old lady and two kids destroyed this town. God, you’re an idiot,” Gillian said, and left the building.
On the sidewalk outside, a woman stepped in her path. “Miss Willard?”
“Leave me alone,” Gillian replied and walked on, but the small woman grabbed her arm. “Miss Willard, please, I’m a friend. I’m the journalist who broke the story about the bodies. I admire what Chris Chandler did, and I’m here to help. Can we talk?”
“Not now, Miss…?”
“Cormier, Jackie Cormier.”
“Please, Miss Cormier, I don’t want to talk right now.”
“Miss Willard, are you and Chris Chandler emotionally involved?”
The question brought Gillian up short. She stared at the journalist. Were they? A wave of doubt crashed over her. Her whole world had fallen apart, and Chris wasn’t there to talk to. She felt awful. She desperately needed to see Chris, to confront him, to find out where they stood. Slowly she answered the journalist. “If we were involved, do you think I’d be here alone right now?”
* * * *
To think he’d slept in this room as a boy. Gilbert grinned at the thought. Back then, the room had felt like a jail cell. He’d plastered the walls with Playboy centerfolds, had an iron bar across the door to keep his old man out, and he’d been lonely and horny as hell. Now he owned the whole goddamn building, and was lying beside a real woman more luscious and accommodating than his centerfolds had ever been. “Everything comes...,” he chuckled to himself.
Dolli, sprawled on her stomach across their small bed, was, as usual, snoring up a storm. The noise she made never ceased to amaze him. It rattled the windows and shook the lamp on the bedside table. How the hell could such a skinny woman snore like a three hundred-pound trucker? But her snoring never bothered him. In fact, he liked it because it signaled that Dolli was out cold, and he could fondle her and do anything he liked to her incredible body, and she wouldn’t feel a thing. Dolli with her snore was like having the best sex doll in the world with its own built-in alarm to tell you when she was available. Of course, sometimes she’d wake up and scream, “What’re you doing, you sick son of a bitch?”
According to the Kit-Cat Klock on the wall with the tail for a pendulum and the creepy moving eyes, Gilbert had slept through noon. “Hell,” he muttered, “we gotta get on a better schedule.” The previous evening, for probably the tenth night in a row, the company had worked and rehearsed and smoked and drunk until dawn. Dolli kept telling him, this was no way to run a theater company. For an Indian, she sure had a lot to say at times. But she was probably right. They had a month until opening night, a month! And when he thought about all they still had to do, he broke out in a cold sweat. Okay, so today he’d get his shit together.
Gilbert rolled off the bed, pulled on his shorts and t-shirt, drank a glass of juice from the mini fridge in the corner and wandered downstairs to the stage. He felt sick as he looked around. Garbage everywhere. Nothing worked right, not the lights or the popcorn machine or the cash register. Stains on the walls. Rips in the carpets. Dolli kept asking him what his plan was for the renovations. Truth to tell he didn’t have one. His only idea was that the place had to look scary as hell. Scary would be okay, she said, but not puke-stained, bird-shit, mouse-crap filthy. All right, today he had to figure out his plan both for renovations and for getting more cash because Dolli was also on his ass about money, every day, a
ll the goddamn time!
He’d been so sure they could fix up the theater and put on some plays with the ten thousand they’d earned with their hearse full of bones. It had never occurred to him he might have to support a whole company of performers to stage his shows. Eleven. He now had eleven employees in his company. Well, not really employees so much as groupies. He’d met a bunch of weirdos on his way back to Lewis and enticed them to come along for the ride. The notion of creating a Goth paradise in northern Vermont had intrigued them. Since he’d arrived home, several more local kids had shown up at his door. So now they crashed in his theater in exchange for acting in his plays and helping out with the renovations. Okay, maybe they spent more time just hanging out, but they said they were willing to help, and he didn’t have to pay them anything. All he had to do was supply Chinese food and pizza and beer and drugs, and they seemed happy enough because they all stayed. Trouble was feeding them was costing him a fortune.
“Right, focus,” Gilbert muttered. Today they were going to get their asses in gear. Okay, so then where was everyone? The twins, Blood and Sweat were already up onstage working on sets. “Morning, fellas,” he said.
“Morning, Gilbert,” they called back in their girly singsong.
The twins were the best guys he’d found. Huge, bald, great big beer guts, scary as hell. To look at them, you’d never have guessed they were queers, except maybe for the leather corset and nylons Blood insisted on wearing. Gilbert had met them at a truck stop in Indiana. They’d started talking over coffee. Turned out the guys had recently left the Coast Guard. At first they’d said they’d been tossed for drunkenness, but then the real story came out. They’d violated the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy; during a threesome with the first officer, some prissy young ensign had walked in on them, and run screaming to the bridge. The officer claimed he’d been attacked, but would stay charges of sexual assault against the twins if they’d go quietly.
The twins had said they liked Gilbert’s vibe and since they had no plans for Christmas or for anything else, and they’d never seen Vermont, they agreed to follow Gilbert and Dolli up to Lewis. To celebrate their new theatrical calling, they had their panel truck painted lavender in Columbus. When one of the paint shop workers made a crack about Blood’s squeaky voice, they’d beaten the poor sap to within an inch of his life. Gilbert had offered the shop manager a huge tip to shut him up, but he’d said not to worry since he’d been planning to fire the guy and they’d done him a favor.
After that, they’d stopped in Ohio so the twins could buy outfits to suit their new lifestyle. Somewhere outside of Erie, Pennsylvania, Gilbert had explained how he planned to pay for his new theater company, and he’d introduced the twins to grave robbery. They’d loved it from the get-go. In a tiny cemetery on a windswept stretch of Lake Erie shoreline, the twins had opened their first graves. They’d made short work of the frozen ground and giggled like kids on Christmas morning as they’d opened each new coffin.
“You here, Manfred?” Gilbert called out.
“Here,” Manfred Arimanes called back from the rafters where he was wiring lights. Gilbert had found Manfred, named for a character in The Castle of Otranto, at a theatrical costume store in Montpelier, where they’d stopped to inquire about renting costumes for Gilbert’s plays. Manfred had served them, and Dolli had taken an immediate liking to him. He wore a kilt, hobnail boots, a heavy black leather jacket with skulls all over it, and white grease paint on his face, with long strands of black hair falling across his eyes. They’d gotten to talking, and Gilbert had learned that Manfred had a DJ business on the side, but had recently been divorced, and his ex was now banging the store owner. Manfred had been keen to get as far away as possible from the store and his ex, so Gilbert and Dolli had invited him to join their theater company as their technical guy. Manfred turned out to be a genius with special effects and anything electrical. Before they’d left Montpelier, he’d wired the costume store to go up in smoke sometime after they’d split. Sure enough, a week later, Gilbert read in the Montpelier paper that the costume shop had indeed burned to the ground and taken half a block of the business district with it.
“Morning, Gilbert.”
“Morning, Lassa.” Lassa Tetana was sprawled across several broken seats in the middle of a row, eating cold pizza and studying lines. Lassa was this incredibly gorgeous, skinny broad they’d picked up hitchhiking downstate somewhere. Her name had been Susan or Julie or something, but as soon as she’d learned the names of her new traveling companions, she’d wanted a new name for herself, and she’d come up with Lassa Tetana. Lassa from the deadly jungle fever, she’d explained. And Tetana? From tetanus. So basically she was named for two incredibly dangerous diseases. Genius, they’d all said.
Lassa had taken an instant liking to Dolli even though Dolli’d made it clear she didn’t ‘switch-hit.’ That didn’t deter Lassa from fawning all over her whenever they were together. Lassa’s attention never seemed to bother Dolli, but then again, Gilbert never could tell what was on an Indian’s mind. Lassa had walked away from a long-time relationship after a huge fight and had never looked back. She’d let it drop one day that she’d spent six months in juvenile detention for carving her mother’s name in her father’s chest after he’d struck her mom one too many times.
“Where are the kids?” Gilbert called out.
The company had six young people. Two were from the local high school and four others, who’d somehow heard about the new theater in Lewis, had simply shown up.
“Don’t call us that, Gilbert. We’re not kids!” Emelia said.
Emelia Tombstone, in the middle of a row, moving from seat to seat scrubbing upholstery as she went, had simply shown up. She was as wide and heavy as a tombstone with a face like a full moon and hair the color of fire, but she had a menacing presence onstage, which made her the perfect villainess.
Someone called from the back of the stage. “Caspar’s here!”
“Where’s here?”
“Behind the backdrop. I’m sketching out the operating theater for Rottingwood.” Caspar Fredrik, named for some German painter, was a skinny, creepy, little weasel who lived to paint, if not sets then walls, if not walls then cars, if not cars then overpasses, and so on, any surface he could spray or roll or smear, and he was talented.
“And the Necros?”
“Wolfram’s out back, smoking up as usual. Wanetta is in the basement making blood,” Emelia replied.
Wolfram and Wanetta Necrodancer weren’t married, but they were ‘wedded to the blissful death that awaited them’, as they put it. They’d also shown up one day, having run away from some private school in Canada. They claimed to be eighteen, but who the hell cared. Wolfram was a would-be poet, pale, and delicate, who edited and copied Gilbert’s scripts, and added all the Goth quotes and references a Goth audience might expect. But he had a weak stomach and spent an hour every morning barfing up the beer and pizza he’d eaten the previous night and smoking pot to calm his shakes. Wanetta was equally small and thin but aspired to become a beautician, preferably in a funeral parlor. Naturally, she’d become the company’s makeup artist and had a special gift for the gruesome.
That left Lady Twilight and Doctor Shadow, the two local kids. Lady Twilight was slender, delicate, with a passable figure and a voice like chalk on a chalk board. Doctor Shadow was a good-looking dude who knew only too well that he was. He had a flair for the melodramatic and had immediately been cast as leading man and doomed hero in virtually every production. They’d both been into dark poetry and Goth music before Gilbert got to town, but they hadn’t been friends and didn’t especially like each other. Good thing too, because the twins had a thing for Shadow.
There’d been another member of the troop, a young man named Francois. The twins had picked Francois up one rainy afternoon hitchhiking to New York but he’d become intrigued by their description of a Grande Guignol theater in Lewis. The twins were charmed by Francois’ Québécois accent but Gilb
ert wasn’t, and when Francois laughed out loud at Gilbert’s Rottingwood play, his fate had been sealed. He wasn’t laughing when he fell from the lighting gantry and broke his spine. Press coverage of the accident had yielded the theater’s first decent run of ticket sales.
So that was Gilbert’s company, and what hell they planned to raise. Gilbert was certain his players adored him and what he was trying to do, all except Doctor Shadow who seemed to think his good looks gave him a pass on hard work. Gilbert put up with Shadow because the kid looked good onstage, and Blood and Sweat hovered around him like flies on a turd. Still, the moment another good looking kid showed up, Gilbert planned to bring Shadow down a peg. An accident, something involving his face, would put an end to his boyish charm.
Besides, another gruesome accident might be just the thing to boost ticket sales again.
Gilbert’s father would have been amazed at the way his performers respected him. His father had treated him like crap or worse, like nothing at all, like he wasn’t even there. Thinking about his dad always gave Gilbert an acid stomach. Funny though, he barely remembered his mother. He’d been eight when she left. If he tried hard, he could recall her big tits and sickly perfume. Oh, and her whiny voice, and some of the crap things she said, like, “You cost me my figure,” or, “Thank Christ I never breastfed you or I’d have lost these two beauties as well.”
One time, Gilbert had screamed at her, “Well, fuck you,” and run down the apartment stairs into the lobby. She’d grabbed a plate and thrown it at him, then chased him out into the street, screaming, “You’re worse than your useless father.” It wasn’t long after that she’d left for good.
He didn’t remember his mother much, but he did remember the day she left. His dad had shown the serial, Rocket Man, the coolest super hero ever, and the popcorn machine had broken down, so they’d had to eat popcorn for supper. What a great day that had been.
After his mother ran off, his dad went completely nuts. All he’d show were old ’40s films. People had gotten angry that he wouldn’t book newer movies, but he’d said he could show whatever he damn well pleased in his own theater, and they could all take a flying leap. Soon thereafter, Gilbert’s dad moved himself into the projection booth and left Gilbert to live in the apartment by himself. Gilbert loved that. He’d paid a kid at school to steal Playboy magazines for him and taped the pictures everywhere. He’d eaten all the crap he wanted, and shot BBs from the apartment window at kids in the other backyards. God, he would love to have had a real gun back then.
