Close to Home

by Nolon King

  “Now you’re fucking with us,” Elliot said.

  “I’m not.” Levi shook his head. He knew how he felt and could imagine his face. “I wish I’d never seen them. I erased all of my pictures.”

  “What did they say?” Dane asked.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You’re the one who brought it up,” Elliot said.

  “No I didn’t. I’m explaining why I don’t want to go inside my mom’s office.”

  “So tell us about the journal,” Dane said.

  “I’m not going into details, but the dude is totally depraved.” Levi remembered the horrors practically dripping off the page, this man’s fascination with blood. Of course it couldn’t have been a woman. Only a man could have darkness like that living inside him.

  Because he knew they’d keep hounding him, Levi finished the story as best he could.

  “It seems like one of my mom’s patients was drowning himself in darkness so that he could figure out who he was. And all of his darkness was covered in blood.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Why does a traffic light turn red?

  If you had to change in front of everyone, you would, too.

  Traffic was usually the enemy, but tonight it felt like solace to Adam. Every red light was another reprieve. Another chance to inhale and exhale and prepare for the inevitable.

  He was out of excuses for staying away from home. But while heading out to the coffee shop to write some last minute one-liners for Anna Lies was fine, not showing up for dinner would be grounds for another fight.

  Adam had expected to get the rough lines out in the first hour or so, then take a walk, maybe down to The Inside Scoop, seeing as it was only a couple blocks away from his favorite Hill of Beans. After his mind was rested he’d go back into the Bean and clean up his work.

  But today he was a hack, and Adam’s muse refused to meet him even halfway.

  Every line was stupid.

  Every idea fell flat as soon as he put it into words.

  Every joke a cliché.

  He usually found it easy enough to fuck with famous people, but for some reason the deep well of vapid celebrities wasn’t filling his bucket. He couldn’t focus, so Adam watched people instead.

  Everyone bored him, until a redhead moved his thoughts elsewhere.

  But that was no surprise, seeing as that was where they had wanted to go from the start.

  And so he followed them out of the Bean and over two blocks to The Inside Scoop.

  Or at least across the way, outside the Sugar and Slice. Adam could smell the pizza, the baking cheese alongside the chocolate. He always could while watching Poppy. He wasn’t surprised to see her, knowing her schedule like he did. That might have had something to do with why he wanted to get his writing done in a coffee shop today, even though the noise and people were most often distracting. Deep down, he’d known that he wasn’t going to be able to focus until he saw her.

  Eventually he went inside to order his scoop.

  She laughed at his jokes and he tipped her. She smiled and scooped as he imagined the blood leaving her body like strawberry syrup. She rang and revved him up, with no way of knowing that the man pressing his erection against his body to hide it was imagining fucking her bloody.

  He threw his two scoops of bacon caramel maple sundae into the garbage, covertly adjusted his still-throbbing cock, then walked back to the Bean and finished his shitty one-liners.

  Adam would have to go over them again after dinner. Right now they were worthless. An apology waiting to happen.

  He was a mile from home. Guilty, resentful, pent-up.

  He wanted to explode, and wasn’t sure how he most wanted to do it.

  But instead, he had to make nice.

  My doctor said I needed to break a sweat at least once a day. So I promised that I’d start lying to my wife.

  Things hadn’t always been this way. They used to be better than he ever thought they could be. He kept telling himself he could get back there, work harder to improve things. But nothing he did seemed to work. Adam would start out with the best of intentions, and as soon as he opened his mouth, the conversation would circle the drain.

  Before I tell my wife something important, I take both her hands in mine. That way she can’t hit me.

  He parked, then braced himself as he walked inside, prepared for battle. Hoping for a truce. And surprised to find Selena smiling as she approached him.

  She was holding his book. Their book.

  Adam wasn’t sure he’d ever seen the red journal outside of her office. She fanned herself seductively, a southern belle about to swoon.

  “I’ve penciled you in for tomorrow.”

  This was new.

  A fresh arousal found him, sudden and different and new, despite it being so very old between them. She kissed him on the cheek and left his skin slightly wet.

  “You’re absolutely right. I have been ignoring you. This is all my fault, and I want to make it up to you. I’m sorry.”

  He didn’t know what to say. Was afraid to utter anything that might destroy whatever this was.

  “Come on,” she said, taking his hand. “Let’s go put this away in my office, and then I’ll show you how sorry I am.”

  Adam could practically smell her excitement. But he had to wonder, on his way to her office, if she was working so hard to make up because she genuinely wanted to help him?

  Or had he made her suspicious by telling her too much about the woman with the blood-red lipstick?

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Selena didn’t need to work out. Not after the way that Adam had pounded her.

  But it felt great to be getting whatever this was out of her system. And besides, even though she hated exercise, Selena loved her AthletaTone.

  She’d thought it was stupid when Adam ordered it for her, right after it first came out. She figured it was the sort of thing she would use three times and then leave to sit in their unused gym, with gorgeous bamboo floors that rarely had the chance to get scuffed. Now she sounded like a commercial for the thing whenever she got the chance to crow about it.

  It really had been such a sweet gift. She hated to exercise, but he’d been right about it being the perfect solution, like he usually was about that sort of thing. She hadn’t given his idea a chance.

  She could be bad about that. And lately she’d been awful.

  For so long, she’d been sure he was harmless. That their sessions were simply a way for her to participate in his fetish without sharing it. But now she was forced to wonder if he might actually be a serial killer, and she was the fool who had missed it.

  She would be a laughingstock. The serial killer expert who didn’t realize she’d married the very type of man she devoted her life to studying.

  And it would be her own fault. She’d paid so little attention to her family, stealing precious time from them to fuel her career. She had to stop.

  But right now life was a maelstrom, with Selena stuck in its center, seething and stirring and churning, struggling to parse beliefs from ambitions, fictions from facts, and family from the very future that she had been striving to create. A future that was starting to seem a fingertip out of reach.

  How could she spend more time with her family when Sam was going to need her to give one hundred and ten percent to the show?

  How could she justify holding back on the project that could ensure her family never wanted for anything ever again?

  Worst of all, how could she make sure that Adam wasn’t about to torpedo both by turning out to be the one thing she’d been certain he wasn’t?

  She had been wrong to put Adam on the back burner. They had to get back on track with regular calendar dates. She had to be sure he wasn’t a danger to anyone else. To do that, she would have to set some boundaries with Sam.

  She turned off the water, feeling a glow inside her.

  Everything was about to get better. First at home, then every
where else.

  She dried off, got dressed, and felt truly fantastic for the first time in days. She would figure out this thing with Adam, and make sure that no matter how crazy things got with the show, she was scheduling regular sessions and time together.

  It wouldn’t be good for the show if she was going through a divorce.

  Or if she failed to keep her husband’s darkness in check.

  Selena plucked the phone from its charger on her nightstand and checked the screen. Three texts from Sam:

  Call me.

  You’re going to want to know this.

  Then, Knock knock.

  Selena smiled, satisfied with herself as she slipped the phone into her front pocket and started downstairs. She smiled again when it rang a few minutes later and she ignored the call.

  But her smile thinned when the texts and missed calls wouldn’t stop coming.

  Curiosity grated and scraped against her, abrading her brain, making Selena want to surrender.

  She didn’t even make it an hour.

  Hating herself as she did it, Selena slipped into her office, closed the door, and jabbed her thumb where it shouldn’t have gone.

  The phone rang twice, then Selena said, “What do you need, Sam?”

  Chapter Forty

  Corban watched his mother’s car back out of the garage as he dialed Kari’s number. Mom was suspiciously vague about where she was going and how long she’d be gone. But she’d promised to bring dinner home if he agreed not to mention her absence to Levi or Dad.

  “So you want me to cover for you?” Corban had said, not because he cared, but because a guilty Mom could be negotiated with. And if she found out what he planned to do while she was out, he’d need all the leverage he could get.

  It worked. He could tell by the way she pressed her lips together before she said, “I’m not asking you to lie, if they ask. But I’m trying to straighten things out with your father, and the simpler things are, the easier that will be.”

  Simple. Right. So he’d nodded and tried not to tap his fingers on the counter while she grabbed her purse and headed out the door.

  “How fast can you get here?” Corban asked Kari.

  “Twenty minutes.”

  She made it in fifteen, breathing hard from pushing herself to pedal at top speed all the way. As soon as she got off her bike, he pulled her inside and locked the door behind them. Then he set the alarm, so that if Levi or Dad came home earlier than expected, they’d hear it beep as it was disarmed.

  “I like your mom,” Kari said, fast and frantic. “I don’t want her to hate me, and if she finds out about this then she’s going to hate me for sure. This is all private and if we—”

  “It’s the only way.” Corban took her hands, then squeezed them gently until she met his eyes. “I already asked her to recheck the letters, and she said she was sure none of them were from the Almond Park Killer.”

  “We could ask her together.”

  “It wouldn’t matter. We have to do this. For your dad.”

  She swallowed and nodded. “Okay then. You go first.”

  Now that she put it that way, Corban didn’t know if he could.

  He was mostly fine at the door, but something inside him disintegrated by the step until he found himself standing beside Kari in front of her office, his hand trembling as he reached for the knob.

  “Corban, if you’re scared, we don’t have to do this.”

  Of course he was, but he couldn’t let Kari think he was a coward.

  I know when someone has been in my office, Corban. I know when someone has been through my things. If I ever, ever catch you going into my office without permission again, I swear that I will make you regret it for the rest of your life.

  He gulped and turned the knob. Kari followed him into the office.

  The air conditioning here was set fifteen degrees cooler than the rest of the house. Or maybe the fear made Corban clammy.

  “Where should we start?” Kari asked.

  He wasn’t sure. The last and only time he’d been in here it looked different. Or his memory was failing him when he needed it most.

  “She’s changed things.”

  “But the letters will be together, right?”

  Corban shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “How long do you think we have … before we need to get out of here?”

  Mom said she was bringing dinner home from Tequila Sunrise, and that was ten minutes each way. And she was clearly planning to do something else before hitting the restaurant. So, “Half an hour, at least.”

  “There’s a lot of stuff in here.” Kari sighed. “Maybe this was a mistake.”

  “I’ll check over there,” he pointed to a long row of cabinets, “and you check her desk. I’ll set a timer for twenty-five minutes.”

  Kari quickly flipped through the papers on the desk. “This is a contract. Is that locked?”

  She gestured toward a single piece of furniture behind the desk, a hutch made of rich-grained wood with a heavy brown wash. Naturally weathered, with the sort of fussy embellishments his mother loved. Plinth bases, crown molding, and fluting on the posts. It looked more like a work of art than office furniture.

  “Might as well check it,” Corban said.

  It wasn’t locked. But it didn’t contain a stash of letters from serial killers, either.

  Mom’s cabinets were stacked with empty Apple boxes, manuals, defunct keyboards and hard drives. A lot of ugly old books. No letters.

  Same for the space in the nook beneath the picture window, and the small empty closet.

  “Any luck?”

  Kari looked over. “Not so far. But your mom doesn’t have a lot of patients. How long has it been?”

  Corban looked at his phone. “Twenty-three minutes.”

  She didn’t respond, just kept looking through the cabinet, without removing a single folder.

  Corban was out of places to look, so he started searching all the same areas again. He wanted to help Kari, even wished that he had thought to start on the filing cabinet first. The buzzer was going to go off, and he didn’t dare stay longer, for fear of being discovered.

  With ten seconds left on the timer, Kari said, “I found something.”

  A pink box, about the size of a toaster.

  Kari unlatched it. Peeked inside, then showed him the contents. A couple of small red journals.

  “It was at the back of the last file drawer, hidden beneath a pile of receipts.”

  What was in it that Mom hadn’t wanted anyone to find? He had to know. He’d find a way to sneak it back in here.

  “We’re taking it,” he said. “I still haven’t found any letters.”

  “Maybe she throws them away.”

  “I’d believe she sleeps with them under her pillow before I’d believe that.”

  Kari closed the file cabinet in slow motion, so it wouldn’t make a banging sound. “We better get out of here.”

  “We still haven’t found anything that’ll help your dad,” Corban objected.

  “If the red journals don’t help, maybe we can try again. We’ll have to sneak this back in anyway.”

  After a quick check to be sure they hadn’t left anything out of place that might signal to his mom that someone had gone through her stuff, they retreated to Corban’s room to examine the journals.

  “Patient X,” Corban said as flipped the pages and realized what he was seeing. “These are my mom’s notes for her last book.”

  “The one that reporter asked about?”

  Corban nodded as he skimmed another passage. “She also calls him The Virgin.”

  “This one goes back more than ten years.” Kari shook her journal. “Is it normal for someone to be in therapy that long?”

  “I guess?”

  How would he know? Mom had always kept him and Levi away from her work.

  Kari slumped and leaned back against the headboard. “So Patient X probably isn’t the killer.”

 
“I’ll keep looking for the letters,” Corban promised. “She must’ve hidden them somewhere else. No way would she get rid of them.”

  Not the good ones, anyway. Which was an awful thing to say about letters from serial killers. But that was his mom.

  “Wait …” Kari jumped off the bed as if goosed. “There was an entry in your mom’s calendar for tomorrow. No name, just a time and the letter X. I thought maybe she’d gotten distracted and didn’t finish whatever she was going to write. But if that’s him, he’s here in Almond Park.”

  “Then I’ll ditch school and see who it is.”

  “We’ll ditch school and see who it is,” Kari corrected.

  Chapter Forty-One

  “I still don’t get it, Pussy …” Elliot shook his head. “Maybe you would be easier to understand if your parents were second cousins instead of first.”

  “Leave him alone, already,” Dane said to Elliot.

  Pussabo said nothing.

  Levi wished he could ignore them all.

  “It’s true, right?” Elliot continued. “Your parents could be first cousins. Because how much could you really know about them? Maybe—”

  “Shut up, Elliot!”

  Now Dane was standing straighter, squaring his shoulders. He dropped his backpack on the ground.

  “This is dumb,” Levi said. “Both of you, chill.”

  “What am I supposed to chill out about?” Dane nodded at Elliot. “He’s the one being the asshole. It’s fucking old.”

  “That’s two fuckings before the first bell. Maybe you need to get laid. Hey Levi, do you think your mom’s home?”

  Levi dropped his backpack beside Dane’s and reached for Elliot.

  “Shit …” Elliot raised his hands and fell a step back. “I’m sorry.”

  Everyone was on edge. Had been for a while. Not just among their group, but the whole school. And really, the city.

  The Almond Park Killer had murdered his town.

  School was a jungle, and Levi was no longer immune — everyone seemed to have decided he was guilty by association. His mom was talking to the police and reporters, smiling for the cameras on a half-dozen stations. His brother was dating the number one suspect’s daughter, whose wife had committed suicide rather than learn she’d been married to a serial killer. If this kept going, would his friends turn against him too?