Life Is Short and Then You Die

by Kelley Armstrong

  Of course, he doesn’t look guilty. There’s no blood on him. He has no scratches on him, no signs of a struggle. Still, he looks a lot guiltier than I do. If someone saw us here, they’d want to believe me, trust in my innocence. Ed makes a good choice for a monster, especially next to me. I’m simply not the sort of girl people think of as “trouble.” Brown hair. Brown eyes. Pretty enough to get a smile but be forgettable. My Aunt Tammy regularly reminds me that I’m “not remarkable.” No one remembers me. No one thinks, “Oh, she is just so fascinating! She’s so interesting! I wish I could talk to her more!”

  That will all change if I’m found with a corpse. Being found with a dead man is remarkable. I’ll be in the paper. I imagine the article, the headline, the picture.

  Hand still in my pocket, I tap the screen of my phone to start a voice memo. Better to be prepared. I sit around thinking about “what if” plans constantly. If anyone knew how often I thought about disasters and ways to escape them, they’d send me to therapy. Again. Someone worse than Elaine. Someone like the therapists at the expensive hospital where I had to go when I was a kid and the cats all died. How was I to know that they’d blame me? The hospital was like a pretty prison, and I didn’t want to ever go somewhere like that again.

  “Maybe we should call the police,” I suggest.

  For the first time, Ed’s falsely bored expression vanishes completely. “There’s no ‘we’ here. What you do is your business, Marie. I wasn’t here.”

  “Really?” I make a show of looking around the open pool area. The lights aren’t working, and there aren’t any security cameras. I already knew that. I planned for it. There is no evidence, no proof as to how the dead guy died or who did it—or even who was here when he died. If I do call the police, it’s going to be my word against Ed’s. If he calls, I look guilty. If I call, he looks guilty. I’d prefer that Ed looks guilty.

  “Really.” Ed steps forward.

  I wish I could take his picture. A video would be even better. Still, Ed’s foolish. I have that going for me. Dumb and dangerous. Honestly, he’s my favorite sort of boy.

  “You’re really going to try to pretend you weren’t even here?” I ask, trying to remember to make my voice quaver and keep it extra soft. Scared people sound like that. I researched it.

  I shiver a bit. Imagine being there with a real killer. Someone deadly. Someone willing to kill a man for looking at his girlfriend. “You’re here. I see you.” I ease a little closer. It’s foolish, but I want to touch him.

  “Not if you’re smart.” He’s stayed mostly in the shadows. Black jacket. Dark blue jeans. Black boots. “I know exactly which room you’re in, Marie.”

  “Are you threatening me?” I struggle to sound afraid instead of excited. It must be working because he smiles in a way that I suspect is meant to look intimidating. So few boys could pull it off. He almost does. Honestly, it’s the sexiest thing he’s done since I arrived here.

  “Was it jealousy, Ed?” I hold his gaze. “Did you see the way he looked at me? Is that why you killed him?”

  He stares at me like he’s finally at a loss.

  “You know, I’ve seen you watching me. I thought it was you looking in my window. After swimming. It was, wasn’t it?” I pause, gasp a little, like I’m trying not to cry. “You could’ve said something. You didn’t need to … do that.”

  “Do what?”

  I step in, put my hand on his chest. “Kill him. He was just asking for directions.”

  I tilt my head up. Maybe I can get a kiss before he backs away. Either way, I have a recording—one in which poor, dumb, sexy Ed doesn’t deny murder or jealousy. Hell, he doesn’t deny peeping, either.

  I shut off the recording.

  “I saw you watching me,” I whisper. “He was watching, too, but I was trying to get your attention, not his.”

  Ed swallows. “You’re crazy.”

  “Sometimes,” I admit. It feels good to say it to someone other than my therapist, to whisper the truth to this stranger. Like telling Elaine, I’m careful. I have evidence that would cover me, the recording. With my therapist, I talk about urges. That’s all. Just urges.

  “I drugged him,” I confess. “Then I cut”—my fingers trace Ed’s throat—“right here. He couldn’t fight back. Roofies in his beer. Then a little slice.”

  A flashlight beam draws my attention. Ed starts to back away, out of my reach. I didn’t even get a kiss, and he’s backing away.

  “Everything okay here?” The security guard, a woman in her midforties, isn’t a surprise. I’ve seen guards pass by at night. Sadly, she’s not one of those middle-aged men with a belly. The woman in front of us is short, but she has visible definition in her arms. No beer belly here. No easily manipulated man.

  “I … don’t think so.” I cross my arms like I’m hugging myself and step away from Ed before motioning at the dead guy in the chair. “He’s not answering or anything. I’m … I don’t want to get too close in case he’s dangerous, but what if he needs help?”

  I try to concentrate on my voice being extra shaky. Shaky says I’m harmless. Shaky says I’m not the guilty person. I add a look of fear toward Ed. Then look at the guard. Then I glance at Ed and down at the ground. I hope she’s bright enough to catch what I’m implying. It’s not like I’m subtle.

  She walks toward the body. “Sir?”

  When she reaches down, I think she expects that he’s drunk, passed out. I see the exact moment that she realizes she just touched a dead man.

  I fold my arms as if I’m nervous. I’ve practiced for this moment for years, trying to look innocent.

  I want to ask her questions. I have so very many questions. Is she afraid? Does she think Ed did it?

  She’s scanning the area now, looking for someone to blame. Her gaze slides right past me and my quivering lower lip. Ed, however, holds her attention a little longer.

  “I’m so scared,” I whisper loud enough for Ed to hear.

  The security guard pulls out her phone. I know what she’s doing, and part of me wants that. I want the police to come, to tell them Ed did it, to see how far I can go, but I remember my father. The urge to gamble is why he’s gone. He knew it. He taught me. The reason killers lose the game is that they get too cocky.

  Ed’s the variable, and I need to sort that out.

  The guard keeps her attention on us, but she steps back so we can’t hear her call. Of course, that also means she can’t hear me if I’m careful.

  I can’t have her call the police, so I take control of the situation. I pull out my phone and tell Ed, “If she calls the cops, you’ll go to jail.”

  “Wh—?”

  “Voice memo, you threatening me.” I wiggle my phone at him. “Stop her.”

  He pauses for just a moment before charging at the security guard. He shoves her, and her head makes a noise like when a pumpkin hits the sidewalk. Thick. Sudden. There’s blood, and I step closer.

  The guard is still breathing.

  “Roll her into the water.” I don’t look away from her. She’s alive, but not for long. There’s something beautiful about it. It’s not as exciting as when the dead guy stopped breathing, but Ed did this.

  For me.

  Ed stares at me, and then glances at the dead body in the lounger. He looks at the injured guard. “If you want her dead, too, you kill her. I’m not—”

  I start to replay the voice memo of our conversation as we stand next to the dying guard. Over the recording of my wavering voice, I urge him, “Do it.”

  He walks away. I hear his footsteps, and I think about what could happen next. He could go to the police. He could pretend it didn’t happen. He could come after me because I have the recording. I get it. I understand the things my father taught me for the first time. Truly feel close to him in a way I haven’t since I stood next to a hole in the woods with him.

  Quickly, I roll the guard into the pool, make sure there’s nothing I’ve left behind, and head to my room to wait. T
he possibilities are almost too much to let me sleep, but the excitement, the thrill of the first time, the fact that there’s someone out there who knows me … it’s exactly what my father used to tell me about in my bedtime stories.

  I know who I am.

  “Daddy’s girl,” I whisper the answer to the question he used to ask every night. He’d tell me stories about the things he did, like lullabies but where the wolf wins. My father used to win. He’d tell me about every Little Red Riding Hood who lost. When I got older, he showed me, too. Every time, he asked me who I was. There was only one right answer: “I’m Daddy’s girl.”

  And for a moment, I can almost hear his answer: “You’re just like your father, Iris. You’re going to be just like me.”

  SUMMER JOB

  By Amanda Witt

  The fire had taken the house right down to the slab, leaving behind a mountain of debris. Fallen beams, blackened furniture. The broken back of the roof. The charred shell of the refrigerator, the half-melted hull of the stove. Everything sooty, covered in ash, eaten by flames, or drowned by fire hoses. And above the remains, stark against the vast West Texas sky, rose the tombstone.

  Okay, not really a tombstone, but Pete thought of it that way. It was a redbrick chimney, the only bit of actual house still standing. It towered over everything else in sight—the blackened debris, the leaning tractor shed. The surrounding fields and pastures, scraggly mesquite trees, cactus, yucca, juniper.

  And Pete. Indoors, your average-sized seventeen-year-old guy. Out there, a tiny insignificant creature toiling alone between the cracked red earth and the blazing blue sky, shadowed by a tombstone chimney.

  Someone had started the fire by splashing gas along the walls, the arson investigators said. Pete pictured uniform-clad people poking around in the still-smoking ruins, studying the position of the blackened body, measuring, discussing, writing things down on clipboards, while fire engines crowded the narrow country road, lights flashing red and white, sirens silent. Silent, because the emergency was over. At least for Mrs. Dean.

  Pete knew what fire could do to a human body; he’d looked it up on the internet. He wished he hadn’t.

  Pulling on his work gloves, he grabbed a crowbar and got busy. It was hard work—sweaty, dirty, lonely—but better than wearing a hairnet and flipping burgers at DQ. And Jerry Dean had pretty much begged.

  “I can’t have some front loader coming in, scraping everything away without sorting through it,” Jerry had said. “This is my mother’s home we’re talking about. Anything worth saving, I want to save.” Raising the stump of his right arm, he’d waved it around so his sleeve flapped loose. “But I can’t do it myself.”

  And whose fault is that? Pete had thought. Jerry Dean, drunk as usual one midnight, had staggered into the path of a Ford F-150. He’d been lucky to lose only an arm.

  But it was true—Jerry couldn’t clear the debris.

  For three weeks Pete had been working, clearing from the edges of the foundation inward, making his way toward the towering chimney. Hot work, hard work. He thought he could finish today. Which was good, because his truck was running on fumes, and he was flat broke. Plus it wore on him, spending all day in the heat, imagining the fiery furnace in which Mrs. Dean had died. Sometimes his arm brushed against a nail heated red-hot by the sun, and alongside the flare of pain flashed an image of Mrs. Dean screaming.

  Pete wanted it to be over.

  Wedging the head of his crowbar under a half-charred beam, he pulled. When the beam tipped toward him, he braced it on his shoulder and began fighting it free from the carcass of the half-burned couch.

  Meanwhile Trigger, Pete’s terrier, darted excitedly around, smelling the trails of possums, raccoons, feral hogs—whatever critters trespassed in Mrs. Dean’s living room at night, rooting through her leavings, licking at the spot where her poor, murdered body had lain. Pete didn’t know exactly where that spot was, but the night animals no doubt knew. And so did Trigger.

  The beam was stubborn; the muscles in Pete’s arms and back burned with effort. A trickle of sweat ran between his shoulder blades and evaporated in the dry wind. Gray-black bits of wood broke loose as Pete pulled, and ashes rose from the ground. He could taste them, feel them coating the back of his throat and nose with their acrid scent. Odors were particulate—as in, actual particles. Tiny pieces of Mrs. Dean’s house were filling Pete’s sinuses, his lungs.

  Tiny pieces of Mrs. Dean.

  Stripping off his work gloves, Pete pulled a blue bandana from his back pocket and tied it bandit-style over his nose and mouth.

  But it was so hot—ninety-eight in the shade, of which there was none. And even if no one else would see or know, Pete would know he was wimping out, being squeamish. Pete, and God, and maybe Mrs. Dean.

  He jammed the bandana back into his pocket.

  Mrs. Dean would have hated seeing her house like this. She would have hated even more becoming a thing of horror to Pete. For years, she’d driven into town to babysit him while his mother worked, and his mother was always working. First she’d waited tables at Hooters—the breastaurant—and then, when she got too old for that, started a business selling custom-fitted “foundation garments.”

  The euphemism was pointless, given that his mom had a big pink decal of a bra on her minivan, signed her name deBRA, and went around asking strangers if their girls needed extra support.

  “This is how you make a living,” his mother liked to say. “Find a job that nobody else wants to do, but that you can do well.”

  Pete breathed in his dead babysitter and dragged crumbling beams to the trailer hitched behind his truck.

  After Trigger finished examining the foundation, he followed some especially interesting scent out into the yard behind the house, then farther on into the pasture. That was no surprise. He spent a lot of time out there. The surprise was the howl.

  It was unnerving, the sort of sound that made people instinctively step closer together. The sort of sound that could make you believe in ghosts.

  Pete froze, the hairs on his arms standing up. Then adrenaline filled his veins as he turned, scanning three-sixty, crowbar gripped tightly in his palm.

  Road, field, concrete slab, yard. Listing tractor shed, untouched by fire, soon to be flattened by wind. Wheelbarrow pocked with rust. Stunted peach tree in desperate need of pruning, the ground beneath its low-hanging branches churned deep by feral hogs. A long section of shingled roof lying flat on the overgrown grass. The dark shadow of the chimney.

  Pete was alone. No attackers. No ghosts.

  “Trigger?” The call came out thin. Weak. Maybe it was the clutch of unease in his chest, or maybe the hot wind blew the word back down his throat.

  Pete breathed deep, tried again. “Trigger!”

  This time the word came out loud and clear, a man-sized bellow, but Trigger made no reply. There was only the sound of the wind; even the ever-sawing cicadas had fallen silent.

  Pete squared his shoulders. Gripping the crowbar, he stepped down off the concrete slab and started across the yard. Around him lay the circle of the earth; above him stretched the wide blue sky. Dry grass crumbled beneath his feet and rose around his ankles, stirred by the wind into a semblance of life.

  Pete felt like the last man standing.

  Halfway across the yard he hesitated, courage failing. He hefted the crowbar, wishing it were a shotgun, and glanced back at his truck—not exactly contemplating escape, just confirming it was possible.

  His truck stood solid and reassuring, right where he’d left it, windows down to keep from trapping the heat. For a while the engine had been ticking quietly as it cooled. Now it was silent, like its heart had stopped beating.

  Pete wished he hadn’t noticed that.

  Then he wished his cell phone got coverage way out there.

  Then he wished a car would happen past.

  It was rare, but two or three times a day a car did pass by. Late every afternoon Pete could count on seeing the yel
low VW Bug driven by Katie Allen, the new girl, who lived even farther out than Mrs. Dean. Katie had a summer job in town, and on her way home she always stopped to say hi. She didn’t know many people yet; she was nervous about school starting.

  Pete didn’t figure she had anything to worry about. Katie was pretty, and classier than the local girls. Her hair was long and glossy, not bleached dry by chemicals, pool chlorine, or sun; and her voice ran smooth and sure, like water flowing in a mountain stream. Or so Pete imagined; he’d never actually heard a mountain stream. Katie probably had. She’d moved around a lot, traveled. Seen things, done things. Pete thought he might ask her out, eventually. If she still spoke to him once she met all the other guys. He wasn’t lacking in confidence, just realistic. Middle of the pack, that was Pete, and Katie was a front-runner.

  Thinking about Katie helped Pete man up almost as much as her actual presence would have. The horizon felt a little smaller, more manageable. The cicadas started buzzing again, too.

  “Trigger?” Pete had reached the pasture, rocky and vast, dotted with prickly pear cactus. “Where are you, boy?”

  Trigger answered with a low growl. The growl was interrupted by a hiss.

  Not a rattler. The hiss was louder than any snake’s, and ragged. The sort of sound someone might make if he’d just taken a blow to the throat.

  Pete’s heart kicked into overdrive.

  Then his brain caught up and he smiled, shaking his head at himself. Trigger wasn’t hurt; he’d just met a batch of buzzards, that was all.

  Sure enough, three of them came flapping awkwardly into view from behind a clump of cactus, Trigger skittering along behind. He saw Pete and barked once in relief—there you are!—and a second time—watch this!—and then nipped and herded, darting first at one bird, then another.

  The buzzards hissed and grumbled, lurching around. Their talons dug into the dry earth and gouged deep scratches. They didn’t attack Pete’s dog, but they scolded him, flapping their enormous wings, sending clouds of dust coiling into the air. They were turkey vultures, Pete saw, not the minimally less revolting black vultures. Their wings started out black and faded to gray at the feather tips; their heads were scaly and a raw-looking red.