DESERT

a novel of terror

PLACES





Blake Crouch





THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS

ST. MARTIN’S MINOTAUR

NEW YORK





for my parents, Clay and Susan Crouch





THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

DESERT PLACES. Copyright © 2004 by Blake Crouch. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010.

www.minotaurbooks.com

Design by Kathryn Parise

Excerpts from “Desert Places” and “The Road Not Taken” from The Poetry of Robert FrostbeYcan quit pissbowl. Showewell bytcold,tll giccitomea new gnerat,tbesyoplumb.”May?”asked,scarceblvoiceSurlways lkledontnooomed.”">Still shacrosadopneosunripnuprusldesIed,girdwbrod worn flasways mosnugwaisIaoshsdresholdImiss,”aidIokedhimfacowvulnerabl, likd lwwe. HeyeadfsomethtwnoonditioonhwaWw?”ask>Hkew well eataidnothe jeda oonncidthhad lrmnalmosisedomstiblmatbetweuIwntwaitfhimolostudwaywalinchillddi”aid,sppptdidntok. Jawaitress.”divdivmbp:pagebak/divdiv4cer">6IF wobbrocchairwei fsway imperceptiblytspsshobe feinshaddiill cool itescapun. Myeyewadlnnorn horizonmass ffoothllsmtAteashiymilewaywnotextuoilopOnhtgeenlowe elevaidenotegeenfestshatdgrayrocloudkglacie fieldsthwouldnemel">Sixyyardsofflefsi fporchsda lrgsh Itokdhasibuilaew,stfsmooth boardsof yellpeglowsinun. AchaiwwrappsnakekarlatchthonncdoublTirslesrosh">Amile osobeyondesersealhddfeoaridgof usybluffsthextesouth,lopgeboeserfloor. Scraggy junipers lined the top, their jagged silhouettes blackening against the sky.

Since dawn, I’d been trying to read Machiavelli in my room. Hot and unable to concentrate on anything except how I might escape, I’d come outside looking for relief in a breeze. But even in the wind, sweat stung my eyes, moistening my skin and hair. Inside, I heard another jazz record—such an eerie sound track to this empty desert, the music so full, effecting thoughts of crowded New York City clubs and people crammed into compact spaces. Normally, I despise crowds and proximity, but now the claustrophobic confines of a raucous nightclub seemed comforting.

I sat on the steps for the better part of an hour, watching the desert turn scarlet beneath the sun. My mind blanked, and I became so engrossed in the perpetuation of mindlessness that I started when the front door squeaked open behind me. Orson’s boots clunked hollowly against the wood.

“Will you be hungry soon?” he asked. The rumble of his scratchy voice caused my stomach to flutter. I couldn’t accept that we were together again. His presence still horrified me.

“Yes.”

“I thought I’d grill a couple of steaks,” he said, and I could tell he was smiling, hoping I’d be impressed. I wondered if he were trying to make up for nearly killing me. As children, whenever we fought, he’d always try to win me back with gifts, flattery, or, as in this case, food. “You want a drink?”

God yes.

I turned around and looked up at him. “If you’ve got it, Jack Daniel’s would be nice.”

He walked back inside and returned with an unopened fifth of that blessed Tennessee whiskey. It was the best moment of my day, like a small piece of home, and my heart leapt. Cracking the black seal, I took a long swill, closing my eyes as the oaken fire burned down my throat. In that second, as the whiskey singed my empty stomach, I could’ve been on my deck, alone, getting shit-faced in the glory of a Carolina evening.

I offered the bottle to Orson, but he declined. He walked around the corner of the cabin and dragged a grill back with him. After lighting the charcoal, he walked inside and returned carrying a plate with two ridiculously thick red filets mignons, salted and peppered. As he stepped past me, he held the plate down and said, “Pour a little of that whiskey on the meat.”

I drenched them in sour mash, and Orson tossed the tenderloin rounds on the grill, where they flamed for a couple of seconds. He came and sat beside me, and as the fuzziness of the whiskey set in, we listened to the steaks sizzle and watched the sunset redden, like old friends.

When the steaks were cooked, we took our plates onto the front porch, where a flimsy table stood on one side. Orson lit two candles with a silver Zippo, and we consumed our dinner in silence. I couldn’t help thinking as I sat across from him, You aren’t that monster I saw on the desert last night. That is how I sit here without trembling or weeping, because somehow I know that cannot be you. You are just Orson. My brother. My blue-eyed twin. I see you as a boy, a sweet, innocuous boy. Not that thing on the desert. Not that demon.

As the last shallow sunbeams retreated below the purple horizon, an ominous feeling took hold of me. The presence of light had afforded me a sense of control, but now, in darkness, I felt defenseless again. For this reason, I hadn’t touched the whiskey after my initial buzz, fearing inebriation could be dangerous here. The silence at the table unnerved me, too. We’d been sitting for twenty minutes without a word, but I wasn’t going to speak. What would I say to him?

Orson had been staring into his plate, but now his eyes fixed on me. He cleared his throat.

“Andy,” he said. “You remember Mr. Hamby?”

I couldn’t suppress it. A smile found my lips for the first time in days.

“Want me to tell it like you never heard it before?” Orson asked.

When I nodded, he leaned forward in his chair, blithe, wide-eyed, a born storyteller.

“When we were kids, we’d go several times a year up into the countryside north of Winston-Salem to stay with Grandmom. Granddad was dead, and she liked the company. So how old were we when this happened? Nine maybe? We’ll say nine so…”

You feel like Orson, and I know, I hope it won’t last, but Christ, you feel like my brother in this moment.

“And Grandmom’s house was next to this apple orchard. Joe Hamby’s orchard. He was a widower, so he lived by himself. It was early autumn, and schools and church groups would come for the day to Hamby’s orchard to pick apples and pumpkins, and buy cider and take hayrides.

“Well, since this orchard backed right up against Grandmom’s property, we couldn’t resist sneaking over there. We’d steal apples, climb on his tractors, play in the mountains of hay he stored in his barns. But Hamby was a real bastard about trespassers, so we’d have to go at night. We’d wait till Grandmom went to sleep, and we’d sneak out of that creaky farmhouse.

“All right, so this one particular October night, we slip outside about nine o’clock and hop the fence into the orchard. I remember the moon’s very full, and it’s not cold yet, but the crickets and tree frogs are gone, so the night is very still and very quiet. It’s near the peak of harvest. Some of the apples have soured, but most are perfect, and we stroll through the orchard, eating these ripened sun-warmed beauties, just having a helluva time.

“Now Hamby owned a couple hundred acres, and on the farthest corner of his land, there was this pumpkin patch we’d heard about but never had the balls to go there. Well, this night was one of those nights when we felt invincible. So we reach the end of the orchard and see these big orange pumpkins in the moonlight. Remember, Hamby had won some blue ribbons for his pumpkins at the state fair. He grew these monstrous hundred-pound freaks of nature.

“We can see his house a ways up the tractor path, and all the lights are off, so we race each other into the pumpkin patch, our eyes peeled for one of those hundred-pounders. Finally, we collapse in the middle of the patch, laughing, out of breath.”

Orson smiled. I did, too. We knew what was coming. “Suddenly, just a few yards away, we hear this loud groan: ‘I LOVE my orange pussy!’”

I guffawed, felt the whiskey burn my sinuses.

“Scared us shitless,” he said. “We turn and see Mr. Hamby draped over this huge pumpkin the size of one of those Galápagos Island sea turtles. He’s got his overalls down around his ankles, and boy he’s humping this thing in the moonlight. Just talking up a storm, smacking it like he’s smacking a bare ass, and stopping every now and then to take a swig from his jar of peach brandy.

“Of course we’re mortified, and don’t realize he’s obliviously drunk. We think he’ll see us and chase us if we try to run home, so we lay down in the dirt and wait for him to finish up and go home. Well, eventually he finishes …with that pumpkin, pulls up his overalls, and goes looking for another. The next one’s smaller, and after he’s bored a hole in it with his auger, he drops to his knees and starts riding this one. We watch him fuck five pumpkins before he passes out dead drunk. Then we run back through the orchard toward Grandmom’s, sick on apples and…”

I see us on that brisk autumn night, as vividly as I see us sitting here now, climbing back over that wooden fence, both wearing overalls and matching long-sleeved turtlenecks. We wanted to be identical then. Told everyone we were, and we looked it, too. Does that bond still have a pulse?

I had tears in my eyes when he finished. The sound of our laughter moved me, and I allowed myself to look freely into his face, surveying the space behind his eyes. But the fingernail marks across his cheek started that woman’s god-awful screaming inside my head again, and I lost the comfort of the moment, and the ease with which I’d remained in his presence for the last half hour. Orson discerned the change, and his gaze left me for the black empty desert all around us.

A gust extinguished the candles, leaving us in darkness. Now the last intimation of purple was exposed against the western horizon, but it blackened the moment I saw it. The sky filled with stars—millions more than in the polluted eastern skies. Even on the clearest nights above Lake Norman, the stars appear fuzzy, as if dimmed behind diaphanous chiffon. Here they shone upon the desert like tiny moons, and many streaked across the sky.

“I’m cold,” I said, rubbing my arms, now textured with gooseflesh. I could barely see Orson, only his shape visible across the table.

He stood. “If you have to use the outhouse, do it now. In fifteen minutes, I’m locking you in your room.”

“Why?”

Orson made no reply. He took the plates and glasses inside, and I sat for a moment after he was gone, searching the sky for meteors. Rubbing my eyes, I came to my feet. I would be relieved to be alone in my room, with nothing to do but read and sleep. The sound of dishes in the sink made me start, and I ran across the warm dirt in bare feet to the outhouse.





7



DAYS passed languidly on the desert. The sun wasted no time setting the land on fire, so after ten o’clock each morning, it became dangerous to venture outside. The heat was dry and stifling, so I remained in the shaded, cooler confines of my room or the rest of the cabin when I wasn’t locked away.

There was no paucity of food. In fact, I’d never eaten better. Orson kept his freezer filled with prime cuts of meat, and he prepared three exquisite meals each day. We ate steak, salmon, veal, even lobster on one occasion, and drank bottles of wine with every supper. I asked him once why he dined like royalty, and he told me, “Because I’m entitled to it, Andy. We both are.”

As I finished one book, Orson would have another for me. After Machiavelli, it was Seneca, and then Democratis on the expunction of melancholy. Though I read a book each day, Orson kept constant pressure on me to read faster. What he wanted me to glean from these classic texts, I could not imagine, and he had yet to reveal.

I obsessed about potential modes of escape. Though I had the opportunity, simply walking away was out. I had neither the strength nor the resources to hike out of this desert, without even knowing a direction in which to head. But I surmised Orson’s means of transportation was locked in the shed. So I’d bide my time, construct a plan, and amass the nerve and will to overcome my brother. I would not be impetuous. Only smart decisions and flawless execution would preserve my life.

Keeping a journal calmed me. Several hours after dusk, when I’d finished reading and Orson had locked me in for the night, I would sit in bed and jot down the day’s events. I’d write for an hour, often longer, sometimes disgressing into thoughts of home and the lake. I’d compose elaborate descriptions of my property, summoning the smells and sounds of the lake in summer to this lonely desert. Without question, it became my favorite time of day, and I considered it a temporary oasis. It was all I could think about during the day—what I lived for. And often, by the time I’d put my pen and paper in the drawer and cut out the light, I could hear the lake lapping at the shore, its breeze stirring the trees.

With respect to time, I knew only that it was late May. Since I’d been drugged during my abduction, I couldn’t be sure which day I’d come to consciousness in the desert. Several days might have passed between that stormy night at the motel and my waking in the cabin. So I labeled my journal entries “Day 1,” “Day 2,” “Day 3,” et cetera, beginning with my first day of consciousness. I couldn’t understand what drove Orson to keep the date hidden from me. It seemed like an irrelevant, useless fact in my present situation, yet it bothered me not to know.

As for the location of the cabin, I didn’t have the first clue. It could’ve been anywhere west of the plains. I pencil-sketched views from the front porch and my barred bedroom window, including the mountain range to the north and east and the ridge of red bluffs in the west. I also sketched the local plant life: sagebrush, tumbleweed, greasewood, lupine, and several other desert flowers that I happened upon during early-evening walks.

Some nights after sunset, when just a blush of red lingered in the sky, I’d see herds of antelope and mule deer moving through the desert. Their silhouettes against the horizon pained me, for as they trudged slowly out of sight, I envied their freedom. I recorded these observations in the journal, too, along with sightings of jackrabbits and long-tailed kangaroo mice. Though I never saw one, barn owls screeched constantly through the night and turkey vultures frequented the sky in the heat of day. I hoped that through the observations I recorded, I could one day locate this desert again. But in truth, I had no way of knowing if I would ever be allowed to leave.



I lay awake in bed. Having finished my journal, it was late, and Orson had disabled the generator for the night, so the cabin was silent. Outside in the dark, only the wind disrupted the oblique stillness. I could feel it pushing through cracks between the logs. Always blowing.

A memory had been haunting me for the last hour.

Orson and I are eight years old, playing in the woods near our neighborhood in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, under a bleached August sky. Like many young boys, we’re fascinated with wildlife, and Orson catches a gray lizard scampering across a rotten log.

Thrilled with the find, I tell him to hold the lizard down, and with a devious smile, he does. I extract a magnifying glass from my pocket. The sun is bright, and in no time a blinding dot appears on the lizard’s scaly skin. The sunlight burns through, and Orson and I look at each other and laugh with delight, enthralled as the smoking lizard squirms to escape.

“It’s my turn!” he says finally. “You hold him.”

We spend the entire afternoon torturing the creature. When we’re finished, I throw it into the grass, but Orson insists on taking it with him.

“I own it now,” he says. “It’s mine.”





8



Day 6 (after midnight?)


Took another shower today. The thermometer read 95°F when I scrambled naked across the blistering ground to the well. I loathe that icy water. Feels just a few degrees above freezing, and it takes my breath as it spills over me. I washed as fast as I could, but by the time I’d rinsed all the soap from my body, I was shivering.

At sunset, I wanted to go for a walk on the desert, but Orson locked me in my room. From my bedroom window, I saw a brown Buick heading east on a slim dirt road that runs perfectly straight into the horizon. He’s been gone several hours now. It feels safer here without him.

The Scorcher is probably hitting the bookstores now, and I’m sure Cynthia has about nine ulcers. I don’t blame her. I’m supposed to start a twelve-city book tour any day now. Signings, radio programs, and television appearances will be canceled. This is going to dampen sales; this is breaking contract with my publisher.…But I can’t dwell on these things now. It’s out of my control and only makes me crazy.

I’m still reading like a madman. Poe, Plato, and McCarthy in the last two days. I still don’t understand what Orson wants so desperately for me to see. Hell, I’m not sure he even knows. He spends his days reading, too, and I wonder what he’s searching for in the thousands of pages, if he thinks there’s some character, some story or philosophy he’s yet to uncover that might explain or justify what he sees in the mirror. But I imagine he only finds morsels of comfort, like that cruelty bit from The Prince or the psychopathic Judge Holden in Blood Meridian.

I hear a car approaching in the distance. This is the first time he’s left me alone, and that worries me. Perhaps he just went for groceries. Good night.


I walked from the bed to the dresser and placed the pen and paper inside the middle drawer. It would be useless to try to hide my journal from Orson. Besides, he did display a sense of decorum when it came to my writing. At least I didn’t think he’d read my journal yet. He respected what he called intrinsic urges, which was writing in my case.

I crawled back into bed, reached over to the beside table, and smothered the kerosene lantern, which I’d been using the last few nights instead of the lamp. The slam of a car door echoed through the open window. I didn’t want to be awake when he came inside.



His voice whispered my name: “Andy. Andy. Andrew Thomas.” My eyes opened, but I saw nothing. The sotto voce whisper continued. “Hey there, buddy. Got a surprise for you. Well, for us actually.” The blinding beam of a flashlight illuminated Orson’s face—a smile between blood-besmirched cheeks. He turned on the lamp above the bed. My eyes ached.

“Let’s go. You’re burning moonlight.” He set the flashlight on the dresser and yanked the covers off me. Glancing out the window, I saw the moon high in the sky. Still exhausted, I didn’t feel like I’d been asleep long.

Orson tossed me a pair of jeans and a blue T-shirt from my duffel bag, which lay open in a corner. Impatient, almost manic, he resembled a child in an amusement park as he paced around the room in his navy one-piece mechanic’s suit and steel-tipped boots.

The waning moon spread a blue glow, bright as day, upon everything—the sagebrush, the bluffs, even Orson. My breath steamed in the cold night air. We walked toward the shed, and as we approached, I noticed the Buick parked outside, its back end facing us, the front pointed into the double doors. The license plate had been removed.

Something banged into those doors inside the shed, followed by a brief lamentation: “HELP ME!” When I stopped walking, Orson spun around.

“Tell me what we’re doing,” I said.

“You’re coming with me into that shed.”

“Who’s in there?”

“Andy…”

“No. Who’s in—” I stared down the two-and-one-eighth-inch stainless steel barrel of my .357 revolver.

“Lead the way,” he said.

At gunpoint, I walked along the side of the building. The shed was bigger than I’d originally thought, the sides forty feet long, the tin roof steeply slanted, presumably to protect it from caving under the crippling winter snows, if we were, in fact, that far north. We reached the back side of the shed, and Orson stopped me at the door. He withdrew a key from his pocket, and as he inserted it into the lock, glanced back at me and grinned.

“You like buttermilk, don’t you?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, though I couldn’t fathom the possible relevance.

“Did you always like it?”

“No.”

“That’s right. You drank it ’cause Dad did, but you came to love it. Well, I think it tastes like shit, but you have an acquired taste for buttermilk. That’s sort of what’s gonna happen here. You’re gonna hate it at first. You’re gonna hate me more than you do now. But it’ll grow on you. You’ll acquire a taste for this, too, I promise.” He unlocked the door and put the key back into his pocket. “Not one word unless I tell you.” Smiling, he motioned for me to enter first. “‘Inhuman cruelty,’” he whispered as I opened the door and he followed me into the shed.

A woman lay blindfolded and handcuffed in the middle of the floor, a brown leather collar around her neck, a five-foot chain running from the collar to a metal pole. The pole rose from the concrete floor to the ceiling, where it was welded to a rafter. When Orson slammed the door, the woman clambered to her feet, wobbling awkwardly around the pole, attempting to gauge our location.

She must’ve been about forty-five, her blond hair losing a perm. Slightly overweight, she wore a red-and-gray bowling shirt, navy pants, and one white shoe. Her perfume filled the room, and blood ran down the side of her nose from a cut beneath the blindfold.

“Where are you? Why are you doing this?”

This isn’t happening. This is pretend. We’re playing a game. That is not a human being.

“Go sit, Andy,” Orson said, pointing to the front of the shed. I walked past tool-laden metal shelves and took a seat in a green lawn chair near the double doors. A white shoe rested against the doors, and I wondered why the woman had kicked it off. She looked in my direction, tears rambling down her cheeks. Orson came and stood beside me. He knelt down, inspecting the shiny tips of his boots. Suddenly, something clenched around my ankle.

“Sorry,” he said, “but I just don’t trust you yet.” He’d cuffed my ankle with a leg iron, bolted to the floor beneath the lawn chair.

As Orson walked toward the woman, he shoved my gun into a deep pocket in his mechanic’s suit.

“Why are you doing this to me?” she asked again. Orson reached out and wiped the tears from her face, moving with her as she backed away, winding the chain slowly around the pole.

“What’s your name?” he asked gently.

“Sh-Shirley,” she said.

“Shirley what?”

“Tanner.” Orson crossed the room and picked up two stools that had been set upside down on the floor. He arranged them beside each other, within range of the woman’s chain.

“Please,” he said, taking hold of her arm above the elbow, “have a seat.” When they were seated, facing each other, Orson stroked her face. Her entire body quaked, as though suffering from hypothermia. “Shirley, please calm down. I know you’re scared, but you have to stop crying.”

“I wanna go home,” she said, her voice shaky and childlike. “I want—”

“You can go home, Shirley,” Orson said. “I just want to talk to you. That’s all. Let me preface what we’re going to do by asking you a few questions. Do you know what preface means, Shirley?”

“Yes.”

“This is just a hunch, but when I look at you, I don’t see someone who spends much time in the books. Am I right?” She shrugged. “What’s the last thing you read?”

“Um …Heaven’s Kiss.”

“Is that a romance?” he asked, and she nodded. “Oh, I’m sorry, that doesn’t count. You see, romance novels are shit. You could probably write one. Go to college by chance?”

“No.”

“Finish high school?”

“Yes.”

“Whew. Scared me there for a minute, Shirley.”

“Take me back,” she begged. “I want my husband.”

“Stop whining,” he said, and tears trickled down her face again, but Orson let them go. “My brother’s here tonight,” he said, “and that’s a lucky coincidence for you. He’s gonna ask you five questions on anything—philosophy, history, literature, geography, whatever. You have to answer at least three correctly. Do that and I’ll take you back to the bowling alley. That’s why you’re blindfolded. Can’t see my face if I’m gonna let you go, now can you?” Timidly, she shook her head. Orson’s voice dropped to a whisper, and leaning in, he spoke into her ear just loudly enough for me to hear also: “But if you answer less than three questions correctly, I’m gonna cut your heart out.”

Shirley moaned. Clumsily dismounting the stool, she tried to run, but the chain jerked her to the floor.

“Get up!” Orson screamed, stepping down from his stool. “If you aren’t sitting on that stool in five seconds, I’ll consider it a forfeiture of the test.” Shirley stood up immediately, and Orson helped her back onto the stool. “Calm down, sweetheart,” he said, his voice recovering its sweetness. “Take a breath, answer the questions, and you’ll be back with your husband and—do you have kids?”

“Three,” she said, weeping.

“With your husband and your three beautiful children before morning.”

“I can’t do it,” she whined.

“Then you’ll experience an agonizing death. It’s all up to you, Shirley.”

The single bare lightbulb that illuminated the room flickered, throwing the shed into bursts of darkness. Orson sighed and stood up on his stool. He tightened the bulb, climbed down, and walked to my chair. Putting his hand on my shoulder, he said, “Fire away, Andy.”

“But…” I swallowed. “Please, Orson. Don’t do—”

Leaning down, he whispered into my ear so the woman couldn’t hear: “Ask the questions or I’ll do her in front of you. It won’t be pleasant. You might close your eyes, but you’ll hear her. The whole desert’ll hear her. But if she gets them right, I will let her go. I won’t rescind that promise. It’s all in her hands. That’s what makes this so much fun.”

I looked at the woman, still quivering on the stool, felt my brother’s hand gripping my shoulder. Orson was in control, so I asked the first question.

“Name three plays by William Shakespeare,” I said woodenly.

“That’s good,” Orson said. “That’s a fair question. Shirley?”

“Romeo and Juliet,” she blurted. “Um …Hamlet.”

“Excellent,” Orson mocked. “One more, please.”

She was silent for a moment and then exclaimed, “Othello! Othello!”

“Yes!” Orson clapped his hands. “One for one. Next question.”

“Who’s the president of the United States?”

Orson slapped the back of my head. “Too easy, so now I’m gonna ask one. Shirley, which philosopher’s theory is encapsulated in this quote: ‘Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’?”

“I don’t know! How the hell should I know that?”

“If you knew anything about philosophy, you’d know it was Kant. One for two. Andy?” Hesitating, I glanced up at Orson. “Ask the question, Andy!”

I deliberated. “On what hill was Jesus Christ crucified?” I looked up at Orson, and he nodded approvingly.

“Golgotha,” she said weakly.

“Two for three,” Orson said, but he didn’t sound as happy this time.

“Fourth question. When—”

“I’ve got one,” said Orson, interrupting. “You can ask the last one, Andy. Shirley, on what continent is the country of Gabon?”

She answered quickly, as if she knew. “Europe.”

“Oh, no, I’m sorry. Africa. Western coast.”

“Don’t do this anymore,” she begged. “I’ll give you money. I have credit cards. I have—”

“Shut up,” Orson said. “Play fair. I am.” His face reddening, he gritted his teeth. When it passed, he said, “It all comes down to this. Andy, hope you’ve got a good one, ’cause if it isn’t, I have a perfect question in mind.”

“The subject is history,” I said. “In what year did we sign the Declaration of Independence?” Closing my eyes, I prayed Orson would let the question fly.

“Shirley?” he said after ten seconds. “I’m gonna have to ask for your answer.”

When I opened my eyes, my stomach turned. Tears had begun to glide down her cheeks. “1896?” she asked. “Oh God, 1896?”

“EEEEEHHHHH! I’m sorry, that is incorrect. The year was 1776.” She collapsed onto the concrete. “Two for five doesn’t cut it,” he said, walking across the floor to Shirley. He bent down and untied the blindfold. Wadding it up, he threw it at me. Shirley refused to look up.

“That’s a shame, Shirley,” he said, circling her as she remained balled up on the floor. “That last one was a gimme. I didn’t want my brother to have to see what I’m gonna do to you.”

“I’m sorry,” she cried, trying to catch her breath as she lifted her bruised face from the floor. Her eyes met Orson’s for the first time, and it struck me that they were exceptionally kind. “Don’t hurt me, sir.”

“You are sorry,” he said. He walked to a row of three long metal shelves stacked piggyback against the wall beside the back door. From the middle shelf he took a leather sheath and a gray sharpening stone. Then he strolled back across the room and pulled his stool against the wall, out of my reach and Shirley’s. Sitting down, he unsheathed the knife and winked at me. “Shirley,” he coaxed. “Look here, honey. I want to ask you something.” Again, she lifted her head to Orson, taking long, asthmatic breaths.

“Do you appreciate fine craftsmanship?” he asked. “Let me tell you about this knife.”

She disintegrated into hysteria, but Orson paid her sobs and pleadings no attention. For the moment, he’d forgotten me, alone with his victim.

“I acquired this tool from a custom knife maker in Montana. His work is incredible.” Orson slid the blade methodically up and down the sharpening stone. “It’s a five-and-a-half-inch blade, carbon steel, three millimeters thick. Had a helluva time trying to explain to this knife maker the uses to which I’d be putting this thing. ’Cause, you know, you’ve got to tell them exactly what you need it for, so they’ll fashion the appropriate blade. Finally, I ended up saying to the guy, ‘Look, I’ll be cleaning a lot of big game.’ And I think that’s accurate. I mean, I’m gonna clean you, Shirley. Wouldn’t you consider yourself big game?”

Shirley hunched over on her knees, her face pressed into the floor, praying to God. I prayed with her, and I don’t even believe.

Orson went on, “Well, I’ve got to say, I’ve been thrilled with its performance. As you can see, the blade is slightly serrated, so it can slice through that tough pectoral muscle, but it’s thick enough to hack through the rib cage, too. Now that’s a rare combination in a blade. It’s why I paid three hundred and seventy-five dollars for it. See the hilt? Black-market ivory.” He shook his head. “An utterly exquisite tool.

“Hey, I want your opinion on something, Shirley. Look up here.” She obeyed him. “See the discoloration on the blade? That comes from the acids in the meat when I’m carving, and I was wondering if it’s scarier for you, knowing I’m getting ready to butcher you, to see those stains on the blade and realize that your meat will soon be staining this blade, too? Or, would it be more frightening if this blade was as bright and shiny as the day I first got it? ’Cause if that’s the case, I’ll get a crocus cloth and polish it up right now for you.”

“You don’t have to do this,” Shirley said, sitting up suddenly. She gazed into Orson’s eyes, trying to be brave. “I’ll give you whatever you want. Anything. Name it.”

Orson chuckled. “Shirley,” he said, perfectly serious, “I’ll say it like this. I want your heart. Now if you get up and walk out that door after I’ve cut it out, I won’t stop you.” He stood up. “I’ve gotta piss, Andy. Keep her company.” Orson walked to the door, unlocked it, and stepped outside. I could hear him spraying the side of the shed.

“Ma’am,” I whispered, breathless. “I don’t know what to do. I am so sorry. I want—”

“I don’t want to die,” she said, begging me with her stormy eyes. “Don’t let him hurt me.”

“I’m chained to the floor. I want to help you. Just tell me—”

“Please don’t kill me!” she screamed, oblivious now to my voice. She rocked back and forth on her knees like an autistic child. “I don’t want to die!”

The door opened, and Orson cruised back in. “Well, you’re in the wrong place,” he said, “’cause it’s that time.” He held the knife by his side and moved deliberately toward her. She crawled away from him, using only her knees because her hands were still cuffed behind her back. The chain always stopped her. Orson giggled.

“No!” she screamed. “You can’t do this!”

“Watch me,” he said, bending down toward her, the knife cocked back.

“Stop it, Orson!” I yelled, my heart beating in my throat. With the woman cowering at his feet, a puddle spreading beneath her, Orson looked back at me.

Think, think, think, think. “You just …you can’t kill her.”

“Would you rather do it? We can’t let her go. She knows our names. Seen our faces.”

“Don’t cut her,” I said. The lumpiness of tears ached in my throat.

“I do it to all of them, and I don’t make exceptions.”

“While they’re alive?”

“That’s the fun of it.”

“You’re out of your mind!” Shirley screamed at Orson, but he ignored her.

“Not this time, Orson,” I implored, rising to my feet. “Please.”

Shirley screamed, “Let me go!”

“Bitch!” Orson screamed back, and he kicked her in the side of the head with the steel tip of his boot. She slumped down on the floor. “Open your mouth again, good-bye tongue.”

He looked back at me, eyes blazing. “It’s perfect with you here,” he said. “I want to share this with you.”

“No,” I begged. “Don’t touch her.”

Orson glanced down at his victim and then back at me.

“I’ll give you a choice,” he said. Walking to the stool, he set down the knife and pulled out my .357. “You can shoot her right now. Save her the pain.” He approached and handed me the gun. “Here. Seeing you kill her painlessly would be as good to me as killing her the way I like to.” When he looked at Shirley, I glanced at the back of the cylinder. The gun was loaded.

“Shirley, get up. I told you it was a lucky coincidence for you that my brother was here.”

She didn’t move.

“Shirley,” he said again, walking toward her, “get up.” He nudged her with his boot, and when she didn’t move, Orson rolled her onto her back. Her temple smashed in, blood drained out of one ear. Orson dug two fingers into the side of her neck and waited. “She’s dead,” he said, looking incredulously at me. “No, wait, it’s there. It’s weak, but it’s there. I just knocked her out. Andy, now’s your chance,” he urged, taking several steps back from the woman. “Squeeze off a few rounds before she comes to. Aim at the head.”

I pointed the gun at Orson. “Slide me the keys,” I said, but he didn’t move. He just stared at me, sadly shaking his head.

“This is gonna set us way back in the trust department.”

I pulled the trigger, and the gun fired. I squeezed it again and again, the plangent crack of gunshots filling up the shed, the gray smoke of gunpowder ascending into the rafters, until only the clicking of the hammer remained, thumping the empty shells.

Orson hadn’t flinched.

I looked down at the gun, eyes bulging.

“Blanks, Andy,” he said. “I thought you might just threaten me, but you pulled that trigger without hesitation. Wow.” He took the knife from the stool and walked toward me. I threw the gun at him, but it missed his head and struck the back door.

“She’s dead, Andy,” he said. “I wasn’t going to make you watch her suffer. Not the first time. And this is how you repay me? He was close now, gripping the knife. “Part of me wants to shove this into your stomach,” Orson said. “It’s almost irresistible.” He pushed me back down into the lawn chair. “But I’m not gonna do that,” he said. “I won’t do that.” He went to the stool, set down the knife, and walked to the .357, which was lying against the back door. Picking it up, he took two bullets from his pocket. “I’d say your little stunt constitutes fuckup number two.” He loaded the bullets and spun the cylinder. When it stopped, he aimed the gun at my chest. “These aren’t blanks,” he said.

Click.

I saw the relief on Orson’s face. “Don’t make me do this again,” he said. “It’d be a real shame if I had to kill you.” He returned the gun to his pocket, pulled out the key for the leg iron, and slid it across the floor to me. “You can use my knife,” he said. “I’ll be back for the heart. Don’t botch it up. Put her on one of those plastic sheets in the corner over there. Otherwise, you’ll be scrubbing this floor till Christmas.”

I’d regained my voice, and I said, “Orson, I can’t—”

“You have four hours. If the job isn’t done when I return, we’ll play our little game again with three bullets.”

He opened the back door, and I saw the sky coming into purple. It didn’t seem like dawn should be here yet. It didn’t seem like it should ever come.

Orson closed the door and locked it. I felt the key in my hand, but I wanted to remain in chains. How could I touch Shirley? She stared at me, those kind eyes open but empty as she lay on the cold, hard floor. I was glad she was gone. Glad for her.





9



THAT is a human being. She was bowling with her family a few hours ago. I leaned down and kissed her forehead. “I am so sorry,” I whispered. “You did not…” Don’t lose it. This won’t help you now. There’s nothing you could’ve done to save her; there’s nothing you can do to bring her back. I’d witnessed unadulterated evil—the mental torture of a woman, and I wept savagely. When my tear ducts were dry, I steeled myself, wiped my eyes, and got to the task at hand.

Years ago, when I had time to hunt in the North Carolina mountains, I’d gut the deer I shot in the woods near my hillside cabin. This is no different. No different from an animal now. She feels nothing. Dead is dead, regardless of where it resides.

The work was difficult. But if you’ve taken an organ from one large animal, you can take one from another. What made this so difficult was her face. I couldn’t look at it, so I pulled her bowling shirt over her head.

The ascension of the sun quickly warmed the shed, and soon it became so unbearably hot that I could think of nothing but a cold drink from the well. My thirst hastened my work, and when I heard the door unlocking, long before the four hours had expired, I’d nearly finished my chore. Orson walked in, still sporting the mechanic’s suit. Through the open door, I saw the morning sun, already blinding. It would be another glorious blue day. A breeze slipped in before Orson shut the door, and it felt spectacular.

“Smile, Andy.” He snapped a Polaroid. It was strange to think that the worst moment of my life had just been captured in a photograph.

My brother looked tired—a melancholic darkness in his eyes. I stopped working and put the knife down. Because I’d done most of the work on my knees, they were terribly sore, so I sat on the red plastic. Orson circled the body, inspecting my work.

“I thought you might be getting thirsty,” he said, his voice now frail, depleted. “I’ll finish this up, unless you want to.”

I shook my head as he peered down into the evisceration. “That’s not a bad job,” he said. He picked the knife up and wiped it off on his pants. “Go get cleaned up.” I stood, but he stopped me from walking off the plastic. “Take your shoes off,” he said. I was standing in a pool of blood. “We’re gonna burn these clothes anyway, so just strip here. I’ll take care of it.”

I removed my clothes and left them in a pile on the plastic. Even my boxers and socks were stained. When I was naked, my arms were red up to my elbows and a smattering of blood dotted my face, though it was nothing a cold shower wouldn’t rinse away.

I walked to the door and opened it. The sunlight caused me to squint while I gazed across the desert. As I stepped onto the baking dirt, Orson called my name, and I looked back.

“I don’t want you to hate me,” he said.

“What do you expect? After forcing me to watch this and making me …cut her.”

“I need you to understand what I do,” he said. “Can you try?” I looked at Shirley, motionless on the plastic, the bowling shirt still hiding her face. What utter degradation. I felt tears coming to shatter the numbness that had sustained me these last few hours. Without reply, I closed the door, and after several steps, the soles of my feet burned, so I hustled to the well. A showerhead was mounted to the side of the outhouse. I filled the bucket overhead and opened the spigot. When the ice water hit the ground, I dug my feet into the mud. The hair on my arms was matted with dried blood. For ten minutes, I scrubbed my skin raw as the silver showerhead, an oddity in this vast desert, sluiced freezing water upon my head.

I cut the water off and walked to the cabin, standing for some time on the front porch, naked, letting the parched wind evaporate the water from my skin. Guilt, massive and lethal, loitered on the outskirts of my conscience. Still so dirty.

I saw a jet cutting a white contrail miles above the desert. Do you see me? I thought, squinting to see the glint of the sun on the distant metallic tube. Is someone looking down at me from their tiny window as I look up at them? Can you see me and what I’ve done? As the jet cruised out of sight, I felt like a child—already in bed at 8:30 on a summer evening, not yet dark, other children playing freeze tag in the street, their laughter reaching me while I cry myself to sleep.

Orson emerged from the shed, bearing the woman wrapped in plastic. He walked fifty yards into the desert and threw her into a hole. It took him several minutes to bury her. Then he came toward the cabin, and as he approached, I noticed he carried a small Styrofoam cooler.

“Is it in there?” I asked when he stepped onto the porch. He nodded and walked inside. I followed him in, and he stopped at the door to his room and unlocked it.

“You can’t come in here,” he said. He wouldn’t open the door.

“I wanna see what you do with it.”

“I’m gonna put it in a freezer.”

“Let me see your room,” I said. “I’m curious. You want me to understand?”

“Get some clothes on first.” I ran to my room and put on a clean pair of jeans and a black tank top. When I returned, Orson’s door was open, and he stood inside before his freezer chest.

“May I come in now?” I asked from the doorway.

“Yeah.” Orson’s bedroom was larger than mine. To my immediate right, a single bed sat low to the floor, neatly made with a red fleece blanket pulled taut from end to end. Next to the bed, against the wall, Orson had constructed another bookshelf, much smaller, but crammed with books nonetheless. Against the far wall, beneath an unbarred window, stood the freezer chest. Orson was reaching down into it as I walked up behind him.

“What’s in there?” I asked.

“Hearts,” he said, closing the freezer.

“How many?”

“Not nearly enough.”

“That a trophy?” I pointed to a newspaper clipping tacked to the wall near the freezer. Skimming the article, I found that the names, dates, and locations had been blacked out with Magic Marker. “‘Mutilated Body Found at Construction Site,’” I read aloud. “Mom would be proud.”

“When you do a good job, do you like to be acknowledged?”

Orson locked the freezer and walked across the room. Prostrating himself on the bed, he stretched his arms into the air and yawned. Then he lay back on top of the red fleece blanket and stared into the wall.

“I get like this after they’re gone,” he said. “An empty place inside of me. Right here.” He pointed at his heart. “You couldn’t imagine it. Famous writer. I mean absolutely nothing. I’m a man in a cabin in the middle of a desert, and that’s it. The extent of my existence.” He kicked off his boots, and grains of sand spilled onto the stone. “But I’m more than what’s in that freezer,” he said. “I own what’s in that freezer. They’re my children now. I remember every birth.” I sat down and leaned back against the splintery logs. “After a couple days, this depression will subside, and I’ll feel normal again, like anyone else. But that’ll pass, and I’ll get a burning where the void is now. A burning to do it again. And I do. And the cycle repeats.” He looked at me with dying eyes, and I tried not to pity him, but he was my brother.

“Do you hear yourself? You’re sick.”

“I used to think so too. A tenet of stoicism advises to live according to your nature. If you try to be something you aren’t, you’ll self-destruct. When I accepted my nature, violent as it is, I made peace with myself. Stopped hating myself and what I do. After a kill, I used to get much worse than this. I’d contemplate suicide. But now I anticipate the depression, and that allows me to take the despair and sense of loss in stride.” His spirits improved as he analyzed himself. “I actually feel better having you here, Andy. It’s quite surprising.”

“Maybe your depression stems from guilt, which should be expected after murdering an innocent woman.”

“Andy,” he said, his voice brightening, a sign that he’d changed the subject. “I wanna tell you something that struck me when I read your first novel, which was good, by the way. They don’t deserve the criticism they get. They’re much deeper than slasher stories. Anyway, when I finished The Killer and His Weapon, I realized that we do the same thing.”

“No. I write; you kill.”

“We both murder people, Andy. Because you do it with words on a page, that doesn’t exonerate what’s in your heart.”

“People happen to like the way I tell crime stories,” I said. “If I had the chops to write literary fiction, I’d do that.”

“No, there’s something about murder, about rage, that intrigues you. You embrace that obsession through writing. I embrace it through the act itself. Which of us is living according to his true nature?”

“There’s a world of difference between how our obsessions manifest themselves,” I said.

“So you admit you’re obsessed with murder?”

“For the sake of argument. But my books don’t hurt anyone.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“How do my books kill?”

“When I read The Killer and His Weapon, I didn’t feel alone anymore. Andy, you know how killers think. Why they kill. When it came out ten years ago, I was confused and terrified of what was happening in my mind. I was homeless then, spending my days at a library. I hadn’t acted on anything, but the burning had begun.”

“Where were you?”

He shook his head. “City X. I’ll tell you nothing about my past. But every word in that book validated the urges I was having. Especially my anger. I mean, to write that protagonist, you had to have an intimate knowledge of the rage I lived with. And of course you did—” he smiled—“my twin. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the tool of writing to channel that rage, so people had to die. But your book …it was inspiring. It’s kind of funny when you think about it. We both have the same disease, only yours makes you rich and famous, and mine makes me a serial murderer.”

“Tell me something,” I said, and he sat up on one arm. “When did this start?”

He hesitated, rolling the idea around in his head. “Eight years ago. Winter of nineteen-eighty-eight. We were twenty-six, and it was the last year I was homeless. I usually slept outside, because I didn’t leave the library until nine, when it closed, and by then the shelters were full.

“If you wanted to survive a cold night on the street, you had to go where the fires were—the industrial district, near these railroad tracks. It was an unloading zone, so there was plenty of scrap wood lying around. The homeless would pile the wood in oil drums and feed the fires until morning, when libraries and doughnut shops reopened.

“On this particular night, the shelters were full, so when the library closed, I headed for the tracks. It was a long walk, two miles, maybe more. Whole way there, I just degenerated. Became furious. I’d been getting this way a lot lately. Especially at night. I’d wake myself cursing and screaming. I was preoccupied with pain and torture. I’d run these little scenarios over and over in my mind. It was impossible to concentrate. Didn’t know what was happening to me.

“Well, I got down to the tracks, and there were fires everywhere, people huddled in tight circles around them. I couldn’t find a place near a fire, so I sat down on the outskirts of one, people sleeping all around me, under cardboard boxes, filthy blankets.

“I was getting worse inside. Got so angry, I couldn’t sit still, so I got up and walked away from the fire. Came to the edge of the crowd, where the people were more spread out. It was late, near midnight. Most everyone was sleeping. The only conscious ones were by the fires, and they were too drunk and tired to care about anything. They just wanted to keep warm.

“There were these train cars close by that hadn’t been used in years. I was standing near one when I saw a man passed out in the gravel. Didn’t have anything to keep warm. I stared at him. He was a black man. Squalid, old, and small. It’s funny. I remember exactly what he looked like, right down to his red toboggan hat and ripped leather jacket. Just like you vividly remember the first girl you’re with. He smelled like a bottle of Night Train. It’s how they made it through the night.

“Nobody was paying attention to anything but the fire, and since he was drunk, I grabbed his feet and dragged him behind the train car. He didn’t even wake up. Just kept snoring. Adrenaline filled me. I’d never felt anything like it. I searched for a sharp piece of scrap wood, but I thought if I stabbed him, he’d have a noisy death.

“When I saw the rock, I smiled. So fitting. It was about the size of two fists. I turned the man gently over onto his stomach. Then I pulled off his hat and dashed the back of his head out. He never made a sound. I had an orgasm. Was born again. I left the body under the train car and tossed the rock into a river. Who’d give a shit about a dead homeless man? I walked the streets all night, bursting with limitless energy. Never slept a wink, and that was the beginning.

“The one thing I didn’t expect was for the burning to return so soon. Two days later, it was back, stronger than it had ever been, demanding another fix.”

Orson rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling. I felt nauseated.

“I’m gonna lock you in your room now, Andy, so I can get some sleep.”

“My God. Don’t you have any remorse?” I asked.

Orson turned over and looked at me. “I refuse to apologize for what I am. I learned a long time ago that guilt will never stop me. Not that I wasn’t plagued by it. I mean, I had …I still do have a conscience. I just realize it’s futile to let it torment me. The essential thing you have to understand about a true killer is that killing is their nature, and you can’t change something’s nature. It’s what they are. Their function. I didn’t ask to be me. Certain chemicals, certain events compose me. It’s out of my control, Andy, so I choose not to fight it.”

“No. Something is screaming inside you that this is wrong.”

He shook his head sadly and muttered Shakespeare: “‘I am in blood/Stepped in so far, that should I wade no more,/Returning were as tedious as go o’er.’”

Then he looked at me strangely, as if something had just occurred to him. There was honesty in his voice, which unnerved me more than anything he’d said all morning: “I know that you’ve forgotten. But one day, I’ll tell you something, and this will all make perfect sense.”

“What?”

“Today is not that day. You aren’t ready for it. Not ready to use what I tell you.”

“Orson…”

He climbed off the bed and motioned for me to rise. “Let’s get some sleep, brother.”





10



Day 10


I feel free again. Orson gave me the afternoon, so I’m sitting on top of that bluff I always write about, looking out over a thirsty wasteland. I’m a good four hundred feet above the desert floor, sitting on a flat rock, and I can see panoramically for seventy miles.

A golden eagle has been circling high above. I wonder if it nests in one of the scrawny ridgeline junipers.

If I look behind me, five miles east beyond the cabin, I see what appears to be a road. I’ve seen three silver specks speeding across the thin gray strip, and I assume they’re cars. But that does me no good. It wouldn’t matter if a Highway Patrol station were situated beside the cabin. Orson owns me. He took pictures of me cutting that woman. Left them on my desk this morning.

Dreamed about Shirley again last night. Carried her through the desert, through the night, and delivered her into the arms of her family. Left her smiling with her husband and three children, in her red-and-gray bowling shirt.

I’ve seen a significant change in Orson’s mood over the last day. He’s no longer morose. Like he said, this is his normal time. But the burning will return, and that’s what I fear more than anything.

I’m considering just killing him. He’s beginning to trust me now. What I’d do is take one of those heavy bookends and brain him like he did that poor homeless man. But where would that leave me? I have complete faith that Orson has enough incriminating evidence to send me straight to death row, even if I killed him. Besides, something occurred to me last night that horrifies me: In one of his letters, Orson threatened that someone would deliver a package of evidence to the Charlotte Police Department, unless he stopped them in person—who’s helping Orson?


I tossed the clipboard onto the ground, hopped off the rock, and looked intently down the slope. At the foot of the bluff, on the hillside hidden from the cabin, a man on horseback stared up at me. Though nothing more than a brown speck on the desert floor, I could see him waving to me. Afraid he would shout, I waved back, put the clipboard into a small backpack, and scrambled down the bluff as quickly as I could.

It took me several minutes to negotiate the declivitous hillside, avoiding places where the slope descended too steeply. My ears popped on the way down, and I arrived spent at the foot of the bluff, out of breath, my legs burning. I leaned against a dusty boulder, panting heavily.

The horse stood ten feet away. It looked at me, whinnied, then dropped an enormous pile of shit. Dust stung my eyes, and I rubbed them until tears rinsed away the particles of windblown dirt. I looked up at the man on the horse.

He wore a cowboy hat the color of dark chocolate, an earth-tone plaid button-up jacket, and tan riding pants. His face, worn and wrinkled, held a vital quality, which suggested he wasn’t as old as he seemed, that years of hard labor and riding in the wind and sun had aged him prematurely.

I thought he was going to speak, but instead, he took a long drag from a joint. Holding the smoke in his lungs, he offered the marijuana cigarette to me, but I shook my head. A moment passed, and he expelled a cloud of sweet-smelling smoke, which the wind ripped away and diffused into the sweltering air. His brown eyes disappeared when he squinted at me.

“I thought you was Dave Parker,” he said, his accent thick and remote. “I’ll be damned if you don’t look kinda like him.”

“You mean the man who owns the cabin on the other side of that hill?”

“That’s him.” He took another draw.

“I’m his brother,” I said. “How do you know him?”

“How do I know him?” he asked in disbelief, still holding the smoke in his lungs and speaking directly from his raspy throat. “That used to be my cabin.” He let the smoke out with his words. “You didn’t know that?”

“Dave didn’t tell me who he bought it from, and I’ve only been out here a few days. We haven’t seen each other in awhile.”

“Well hell, all this, far as you can see, is mine. I own a ranch ten miles that a way.” He pointed north toward the mountains. “Got four hundred head of cattle that graze this land.”

“This desert?”

“It’s been dry lately, but it greens up with Indian rice grass after a good rain. Besides, we run ’em up into the Winds, too. Yeah, I’d never have sold that cabin, except your brother offered me a small fortune for it. Sits dead in the middle of my land. So I sold him the cabin and ten acres. Hell, I don’t know why anybody’d wanna own a cabin out here. Ain’t much to look at, and there’s no use coming here in the winter. But hell, his money.”

“When did he buy it from you?”

“Oh shit. The years all run together now. I guess Dr. Parker bought it back in ’91.”

“Dr. Parker?”

“He is a doctor of something, ain’t he? Oh hell, history maybe? Ain’t he a doctor of history? I haven’t spoken to the man in two years, so I may be wrong about—”

“He made you call him Dr.?” I interrupted, forcing myself to laugh and diverting the man’s attention from my barrage of questions. “That bastard thinks he’s something else.”

“Don’t he though,” the cowboy said, laughing, too. I smiled, relieved I’d put him at ease, though I’m sure it wasn’t all my doing.

“He still teaching at that college up north?” the man asked. “My memory ain’t worth two shits anymore. Vermont maybe. Said he taught fall and spring and liked to spend summers out here. Least he did two years ago.”

“Oh. Yeah, he is. Sure is.” I tried to temper the shock in my voice. Not in a thousand years had I expected to come into contact with another person in this desert. It was exhilarating, and I prayed Orson wouldn’t see this cowboy riding so close to his cabin.

“Well, I best be heading on,” he said. “Got a lot more ground to cover before this day’s through. You tell Dr. Parker I said hello. And what was your name?”

“Mike. Mike Parker.”

“Percy Madding.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Percy,” I said, stepping forward and shaking his gloved hand.

“Good to know you, Mike. And maybe I’ll drop in on you boys sometime with a bottle of tequila and a few of these.” He wiggled the joint in his hand; it had burned out for the moment.

“Actually, we’re leaving in several days. Heading back east.”

“Oh. That’s a shame. Well, you boys have a safe trip.”

“Thank you,” I said, “and oh, one more thing. What’s that mountain range in the north and east?”

“The Wind Rivers,” he said. “Loveliest mountains in the state. They don’t get all the goddamned tourists like the Tetons and Yellowstone.”

Percy pulled a silver lighter from his pocket, relit the joint, and spurred his horse softly in the side. “Hit the road, Zachary,” he said, then clicked his tongue, and trotted away.





11



MID-AFTERNOON, I walked in the front door of the cabin, dripping with sweat. Orson lay on the living room floor, his bare back against the cold stone, a book in his hands. I stepped carefully over him and collapsed onto the sofa.

“What are you reading?” I asked, staring at the perfect definition of his abdominal and pectoral muscles. They shuddered when he breathed.

“A poem, which you just ruined.” He threw the book across the floor, and his eyes met mine. “I have to read a poem from beginning to end, without interruption. That’s how poetry blossoms. You consume it as a whole, not in fractured pieces.”

“Which poem?”

“‘The Hollow Men,’” he said impatiently, gazing up into the open ceiling, where supportive beams upheld the roof. He sprang up suddenly from the floor, using the sheer power of his legs. Sitting down beside me on the sofa, he tapped his fingers on his knees, watching me with skittish eyes. I wondered if he’d seen the cowboy.

“Go get cleaned up,” he said abruptly.

“Why?” His eyes narrowed. He didn’t have to ask me a second time.



Looking in the side mirror, I watched the shrinking cabin. The sun, just moments below the horizon, still bled mauve light upon the western edge of sky. The desert floor held a Martian red hue in the wake of the passing sun, and I watched the land turn black and lifeless again. Heading east, I looked straight ahead. Night engulfed the Wind River Range.

We sped along a primitive dirt road, a ribbon of dust trailing behind us like the contrail of a jet. Orson hadn’t spoken since we’d left the cabin. I rolled my window down, and the evening air cooled my sun-scorched face.

Orson jammed his foot into the brake pedal, and the car slid to a stop. There was an empty highway several hundred feet ahead, the same I’d seen from the bluffs. He reached down to the floorboard at his feet, grabbed a pair of handcuffs, and dropped them in my lap.

“Put one cuff on your right wrist and attach the other cuff to the door.”

I put the handcuffs on as instructed. “What are we doing here?” I asked.

He leaned over and tested the security of the handcuffs, and turned off the engine. It became instantly silent, for the wind had died at dusk. I watched Orson as he stared ahead. He wore another blue mechanic’s suit and those snakeskin boots. I wore a brown one, identical to his. One of the four closets in the hallway that connected the bedrooms and the living room was filled with them.

Orson’s beard had begun to fill in, painting a shadow across his face in the same pattern it spread across mine. Such subtleties create the strongest bond between twins, and as I watched Orson, I felt a glimmer of intimacy in a vessel that had long since died to that sort of love. But this was not the man I had known. You are a monster. Losing my brother had been like losing an appendage, but as I looked at him now, I felt like an amputee having a nightmare that the limb had grown back—demonic, independent of my will.

“You see Mom much?” Orson asked, his eyes fixed on the highway.

“I drive up to Winston twice a month. We go to lunch and visit Dad’s grave.”

“What does she wear?” he asked, still watching the road, his eyes never diverting to mine.

“I don’t under—”

“Her clothes. What clothes does she wear?”

“Dresses, mostly. Like she used to.”

“She ever wear that blue one with the sunflowers on it?”

“I don’t know.”

“When I dream about her, that’s what she wears. I went to see her once,” he said. “Drove up and down Race Street, watching the house, seeing if I could catch a glimpse of her in the front yard or through the windows. Never saw her, though.”

“Why didn’t you go through with it?”

“What would I say to her?” He paused, swallowing. “She ever ask about me?”

I considered lying but could find no reason to spare his feelings. “No.”

“You ever talk to her about me?”

“If I do, it’s just about when we were kids. But I don’t think she even likes those stories anymore.” Down the highway, northbound headlights appeared, so far off, I couldn’t distinguish the separate bulbs.

“That car won’t pass this spot for ten minutes,” he said. “It’s still miles away. These roads are so long and straight, the distance is deceiving.”

My right hand throbbed in the grip of the metal cuff. Blood wasn’t reaching my fingers, but I didn’t complain. I massaged them until the tingling went away.

“What do you really want with me?” I asked, but Orson just eyed those approaching headlights like I hadn’t said a word. “Orson,” I said. “What do you—”

“I told you the first day. I’m giving you an education.”

“You think reading boring fucking books all day constitutes an education?”

He looked me dead in the eyes. “The books have nothing to do with it. Surely you realized that by now.”

He cranked the engine and we rolled toward the highway. Dark now, the sky completely drained of light, we crossed the pavement and pulled onto the shoulder. I watched the headlights through the windshield, and for the first time, they seemed closer. Confused, I looked at Orson.

“Sit tight,” he said. Turning off the car, he opened his door and stepped out. He withdrew a white handkerchief from his pocket and tied it to the antenna. Then he shut the door and stuck his head through the open window. “Andy,” he warned, “not a word.”

He sat with his arms crossed on the edge of the hood. Rolling my window up, I tried to assuage my apprehension, but I just stared ahead, praying the car would pass. After awhile, I heard its engine. Then the headlights closed in, seconds away.

A minivan rushed by. I watched its brake lights flush in the rearview mirror. The van turned around, glided slowly back toward us, and stopped on the opposite shoulder. The driver’s door opened and the interior lights came on. Children in the backseat. A man our age climbed out, said something to his wife, and walked confidently toward Orson. His kids watched through the tinted glass.

The man wore khaki shorts, loafers, and a red short-sleeved polo shirt. He looked like a lawyer taking his family on a cross-country vacation.

“Car trouble?” he asked, crossing the dotted yellow line and stopping at the shoulder’s edge.

My brother smiled. “Yeah, she’s thirsty for oil.”

Through the windshield, I noticed another set of northbound headlights.

“Can I give you a lift or let you use my cell phone?” the man offered.

“Actually, we’ve got someone on the way,” Orson said. “Wouldn’t want to trouble you.”

Thank you, God.

“Well, just wanted to make the offer. Bad spot to break down.”

“Sure is.” Orson extended his hand. “But thank you anyway.”

The man smiled and took my brother’s hand. “I guess we’ll be heading on, then. Hoping to make Yellowstone before midnight. The kids are just wild about that damn geyser.”

“Have a safe trip,” Orson said. The man crossed the road and climbed back into his van. My brother waved to the kids in the backseat, and they giggled and waved back, delighted. As the van drove away, I watched its taillights begin to fade in the rearview mirror.

The next car was close now. It slowed down before it passed us, then pulled over onto the shoulder on our side of the road, stopping just ten feet from the front bumper of Orson’s Buick. From a black Ford pickup truck, one of the enormous new models with a rack of blinding KC lights mounted above the cab, a large man with a substantial beer gut hopped down from behind the wheel. He left the truck running, and the headlights fried my eyes. A country ballad blared from the speakers, and as the driver walked unsteadily toward Orson, I could tell he was drunk. Two other men climbed down out of the passenger side and approached my brother, too.

“Hello, gentlemen,” Orson said as they surrounded him. Each man nursed a pinch of dip crammed between his teeth and bottom lip. The two passengers wore cowboy hats, and the driver held a ragged Redskins cap, his long hair, tangled and greasy, hanging in his face.

“Something wrong with your car?” the driver asked. He spat into the road, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and wiped his hand across his black tank top, which had a blue-and-silver Ford emblem across the front. He hadn’t shaved recently.

“Don’t know,” Orson said. “I was hoping someone would stop who had a little mechanical expertise.” The two passengers dissolved into a drunken giggle, and the driver glanced over at them and smiled. Their teeth were gray and orange from excessive dipping, but regardless of the men’s deficient hygiene, not a one looked older than thirty.

“Where you from, boy?” one of the passengers asked.

Orson assessed the tall, skinny man on the far left and smiled. “Missouri.”

“You a long way from home, ain’t ye?” he said, then took a sip from his beer can.

“Yes, I am,” Orson said, “and I’d appreciate your help.”

“It might cost you something,” the driver said. “It might cost you a whole lot.” He looked at his buddies again, and they all laughed.

“I don’t want any trouble, now.”

“How much money you got?” asked the heavyset man standing in the middle. With dark, bushy sideburns and a hairy belly poking out between his black jeans and white grease-stained T-shirt, he looked so hideously disheveled, I imagined I could smell him through the windshield.

“I don’t know,” Orson said. “I’ll have to go get my wallet and see.”

Orson stepped cautiously by the driver and headed for the trunk, smiling and winking at me as he passed my window. I heard the trunk open, followed by the sound of rustling plastic.

The driver caught me looking at him through the windshield.

“What in the goddamn hell you looking at, boy?” he said. Orson walked by my door again and stopped on the right side of the hood. The three men stared at him suspiciously, though too drunk to notice that he now wore black gloves.

“Your friend’s gonna get his ass whupped if he keeps staring at me.”

“He’s harmless,” Orson said. “Look, I could give you twenty dollars. Would that be sufficient?”

The driver glared at him, dumbfounded. “Let me see your wallet,” he said finally.

“Why?”

“Motherfucker, I said give me your wallet.” Orson hesitated. “You stupid, boy? Wanna get your ass kicked?”

“Look, guys, I said I don’t want any trouble.” Orson let the fear ooze from his voice.

“Then cough up your wallet, you dumb shit,” said the obese middle passenger. “We need more beer.”

“Will you fix my car?” The men broke into laughter. “I have more than twenty dollars,” Orson pleaded. “At least look under the hood and see if you can tell what’s wrong.”

Orson moved to the front of the Buick. Reaching through the grille, he pulled a lever and lifted the massive hood. Then he returned to where he’d been standing, on the right side of the car, near me. I could see nothing now but my brother, still talking to the men.

“Just take a look,” Orson prodded. “Now if you guys don’t know anything about cars…”

“I know cars,” a voice said. “Stupid city fuck. Don’t know shit about shit, do you?”

The Buick squeaked and sank as if someone had knelt against the bumper.

“Check the radiator,” Orson said. “Something’s causing the engine to overheat.”

The car shifted again. “No, on the inside,” Orson said. “I think something melted. You have to get closer to see. Move, guys. You’re in his light.”

A muffled voice said, “I don’t know what in the fuck—”

Orson slammed the hood. The two passengers shrieked and jumped back in horror. Blood speckled the windshield. Orson lifted the hood once more and slammed it home. The driver sprawled momentarily against the hood, squirting the windshield as he sank down into the dirt.

“Get the shotgun!” the fat one yelled, but no one moved.

“Don’t worry about it, boys,” Orson said in that same timorous voice. “I have a gun.” He pointed my .357 at the two men. “I hope you aren’t too fucked up to know what this is. You,” he told the slender man, “pick up your buddy’s head.” The man dropped his beer can. “Go on, he won’t bite you.” The man lifted it off the ground by its long, grimy hair. “Right this way, boys,” Orson said. “Walk around the side of the car. That’s it.” The men walked by the driver’s door, and Orson walked by mine. I turned to look through the back window, but the trunk was open. He’d never shut it.

“I’m sorry about the wallet.…”

“In you go,” Orson said. The car didn’t move. “Do I have to shoot you both in the kneecaps and drag you in there myself? I’d rather you not bleed all over my car if it can be helped.” When the hammer cocked, the car suddenly shook as the men climbed clumsily into the trunk.

“Stupid, stupid boys,” Orson said. “It’d have been better for you if you’d all three looked under that hood.” He closed the trunk.

As Orson walked back toward the truck, I heard the boys begin to sob. Then they screamed, pounding and kicking the inside of the trunk. As Orson climbed into the truck and turned off the headlights and KC lights, I noticed the laboriously slow ballad still pouring from the black Ford, the steel guitar solo twanging into the desert. As my eyes readjusted to the darkness, the music stopped. The driver’s door of the Buick opened, and Orson reached into the backseat and picked up a two-by-four and a length of rope.

He shut the door and said, “If they keep carrying on, tell them you’re gonna kill them.”

“Look.” I pointed down the road at a pair of headlights just coming into view.

Orson untied the handkerchief from the antenna and ran back to the truck. He climbed into the cab again, put the truck in gear, and let it roll forward several feet until it pointed east into the desert. For several minutes, Orson worked on something inside the cab. The men continued to moan, their intoxication intensifying their fear, making their pleadings more desperate. I didn’t say a word to them, and still the headlights approached.

The Ford sped off into the desert. I watched it through the windshield and then through the windows on the driver’s side. In ten seconds, it had disappeared into the night. Orson came running up to the car, breathless. He gave me a thumbs-up and dragged the driver to the back of the car. Then he was at my window.

“I need your help,” he said, opening the door. He unlocked the handcuffs and handed me the car keys. As we walked to the back of the Buick, I could hear the approaching car in the distance and see the taillights of the minivan, which had yet to fully disappear—a glowing red eye dwindling into darkness. I clung to that happy family. We let them go. We let them go. I looked down, but there was still no license plate on the Buick.

Orson pointed at the driver on the ground and said, “When I tell you, unlock the trunk and throw him in there. Can you do it?” I nodded.

“Gentlemen!” Orson yelled: “The trunk is being opened, and I’ll be pointing a three-fifty-seven at you. Breathe and I start squeezing.”

Orson looked at me and nodded. I opened the trunk without looking inside at the men or the body I had to lift. Heaving the driver from the ground, I shoved his limp, heavy frame on top of the two men. Then I slammed the trunk, and we got back into the car.

Orson started the Buick after the oncoming car passed us. The interior lights came on, and I gasped when I looked down at my brown suit, doused in blood, which had pooled and run down the coarse cloth into my boots. I screamed at Orson to stop the car. Stumbling outside, I fell to my knees and rolled around, scrubbing my hands with dirt until the blood turned granular.

From inside the car, Orson’s voice reached me. He was slapping the steering wheel, his great bellows of laughter erupting into the night air.





12



HEADING back to the cabin, the men continued to pound against the inside of the trunk. Orson relished their noisy fear. Whenever they screamed, he mocked and mimicked their voices, often surpassing their pleas.

Watching the dirt road illuminated by the headlights, I asked Orson what he’d done to the truck. He grinned. “I secured the steering wheel with that rope so the truck would stay straight, and I shoved that two-by-four between the front seat and the gas pedal.” Orson glanced at his luminescent watch. “For the next half hour, it’ll roll through twenty-five miles of empty desert. Then it’ll run into the mountains, and that’s where it’ll stop, unless it hits a mule deer along the way. But it’d have to be a big buck to stop that monster truck.

“Eventually, someone will find it. Maybe in a few days, maybe in several weeks. But by then it won’t matter, ’cause these boys’ll be pushing up sagebrush. Local law enforcement will probably find out where they were coming from and where they were headed. They’ll realize something happened on that road back there, but so what? It’s gonna rain tomorrow for the first time in weeks and rinse all the blood from the ground. Only two cars saw us, and they both had out-of-state tags, so they were just passing through. This’ll be an unsolved disappearance, and judging from the rude dispositions of these young men, I have a hard time believing anyone will give much of a shit.”

Upon reaching the cabin, Orson pulled up to the shed. When we got out, he called to me from the front of the Buick, popped the hood, and motioned for me to look inside. Floodlights mounted to the shed illuminated the metallic cavity as I peered in.

“What?” I asked, staring at the corroded engine.

“You’d have fallen for it, too. Look.” A few inches in, a piece of metal three feet long had been welded to the underside of the hood. “It’s an old lawn mower blade,” Orson said. “Razor-sharp. Especially in the middle. If his head had been a little farther to the right, it would’ve come clean off the first slam.” Gingerly, I touched the blade with my index finger. It was scratchy sharp, and there was blood on it, sprayed all over the engine, too.

“Have you done this hood trick before?” I asked.

“On occasion.”

One of the men yelled from inside the trunk, “Let me out, motherfucker!”

Orson laughed. “Since he asked politely. Come open it up.” He tossed me the keys. “You hear that, boys?” he yelled, moving toward the trunk. “I’m opening it up. No movement.”

I raised the trunk while Orson stood with the gun pointed at the men. As I backed away, he whispered, “Go get the handcuffs.”

I glanced into the plastic-lined trunk, a gruesome spectacle. The driver had been shoved to the back of the roomy compartment, but not before his blood had soaked his friends. They looked at me as I walked by, their eyes pleading for mercy that wasn’t mine to give. I grabbed the handcuffs from the floorboard on the passenger’s side and returned to Orson.

“Throw them the handcuffs,” he said. “Boys, lock yourselves together.”

“Go fuck yourself,” said the heavy man. Orson cocked the hammer and shot a hole in his leg. As the man howled and screamed obscenities, Orson turned the gun on the other man.

“Your name, please,” he said.

“Jeff.” The man trembled, his hands in front of his face, as if they could stop bullets. His friend grunted and squealed through his teeth as he grasped his thigh.

“Jeff,” Orson said. “I suggest you take the initiative and handcuff yourself to your pal.”

“Yes sir,” Jeff said, and as he cuffed his own hand, Orson spoke to the wounded man, who was now grinding his teeth together, trying not to scream.

“What’s your name?” Orson said.

Through clenched teeth, the man responded, “Wilbur.”

“Wilbur, I know you’re in agonizing pain, and I wish I could tell you it’s all gonna be over soon. But it’s not.” Orson patted him tenderly on the shoulder. “I just wanted to assure you that this night has only begun, and the more you buck me, the worse it’s gonna be for you.”

When Jeff and Wilbur were cuffed together, Orson ordered them to get out. Wilbur had difficulty moving his leg, so Orson directed me to drag him out of the trunk. As he screamed, I pulled him onto the ground, and Jeff fell on him, crushing the injured thigh.

Leaving their cowboy hats in the trunk, the two men came slowly to their feet, and Orson led them toward the back of the shed. As he unlocked the door, he told me to go wrap the driver up in the plastic lining and remove him from the trunk.

“I can’t lift him by myself,” I said. “The blood’ll spill everywhere.”

“Just go shut it, then. But we gotta get him out before he starts stinking.”

I returned to the car and closed the trunk. Walking back toward the shed, I felt the keys jingle in my pocket. Staring at the brown car, dull beneath the floodlights, I thought, I could go. Right now. Get in the car, turn the ignition, and drive back to the highway. There’s probably a town, maybe thirty or forty miles away. You find a police station, you bring someone here. Maybe you save them. Sliding my hand into my pocket, I poked a finger through the key ring. Orson’s voice passed through the pine structure, taunting the groaning man inside.

Go. I started for the driver’s seat. Shit. The hood was still raised, and I quietly lowered it so that it closed with a soft metallic click, which Orson could not have heard from inside the shed. With the key held firmly between my thumb and forefinger, I opened the car door, my hands shaking now, and sat down in the driver’s seat. Key into the ignition. Check the parking brake. Don’t shut the door until you’re moving. Turn the key. Turn the key.

Something tapped on the window, and, flinching, I looked over at Orson, who was standing by the passenger door, pointing the revolver at my head through the glass.

“What in the world are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m coming,” I said. “I was coming.” I pulled the keys from the ignition and stepped out of the car. “Here.” I tossed him the keys and walked toward the shed. Don’t shoot me. Please. Pretend this didn’t happen. At the back door he stopped me.

“I’m considering killing you,” he said. “But you’ve got an opportunity in here to dissuade me. After you.”

He followed me into the shed and locked the door behind us, having already collared the men individually and chained them to the pole. You’ve seen this before. It won’t be as bad as Shirley. Can’t be. We let the family go. We let the family go. Those kids will see Old Faithful tomorrow. Hold on to that.

Orson retrieved his handcrafted knife and inserted a tape into a video camera that sat on a black tripod in the corner. I didn’t recall seeing a video camera on Shirley’s night.

When he noticed me looking at the camera, he said, “Hey, I gotta have something to tide me over.” Orson walked to the center of the room with his knife as Wilbur moaned on the floor.

“Jeff,” Orson said, “you’re smarter than your recalcitrant friend here. I’ve known you only forty minutes, and it’s an obvious fact.” Orson looked at me and said, “Drag the plastic over here, Andy.” I walked to the corner, where at least two dozen neatly folded sheets were stacked. On a nearby shelf, I noticed a cardboard box filled with votive candles, and I wondered to what use Orson put them.

“Look,” Jeff said, “please just listen—”

“Zip it, Jeff. It’s futile. Normally, I’d have given you two a test, but your roadside manner automatically flunks you both. So with that matter settled, get up, gentlemen.”

Jeff stood, but Wilbur struggled. He’d already bled a little pool onto the floor. I spread the sheet near the pole, and the men sat back down, Jeff looking with confusion at the plastic beneath him.

“Jeff,” Orson continued, “how long you known Wilbur?”

“All my life.”

“Then this might be a difficult decision for you.” I was leaning against the double doors, and Orson looked back at me. “Have a seat, Andy. You’re making me nervous.”

As I sat down in the lawn chair, Orson turned back to Jeff and held up the knife and the revolver. “Jeff, the bad news is you’re both going to die tonight. The slightly better news is that you get to decide who gets the easy way and who gets the fun way. Option A. My brother executes you with this three fifty-seven. If you choose the gun, you have to go first. Option B. I take this gorgeous knife and cut your heart out while you watch.” Orson smiled. “Take a moment to think it over.”

My brother walked to me as the men stared at each other on the plastic—Jeff crying, Wilbur on the verge of losing consciousness. Orson leaned down and whispered into my ear: “Whoever you shoot, you’re doing them an act of kindness. They’ll feel nothing. I’m not even gonna make you watch what I do with this knife tonight. You can go back to the house and go to bed.”

Orson returned to the center of the room and looked down at the men. “Jeff, I’m gonna have to ask—”

Jeff sobbed. “Why are you—”

“If the next words from your mouth aren’t ‘Shoot me’ or ‘Shoot him,’ I’ll take both your hearts out. Decide.”

“Shoot me,” Jeff cried, his lips pulling back, exposing rotten teeth. Wilbur, still holding his leg, glared at Orson.

My brother walked to the back door and said, “Andy, I thought about it, and I’m only leaving you one bullet in the gun. Wouldn’t want you to do them both a favor.” Orson emptied the cylinder and reloaded one round.

“Behind the ear, Andy. Anywhere else and you might not kill him. He’d just lay around suffering.” Orson set the gun on the floor. “I’d love to stay and watch, but after that incident with Miss Tanner, well …I’ll come back when I hear the gunshot. Don’t do anything heroic like not shoot him or destroy the gun. I have others, and we’d have to play our little game again. I think the stakes are up to sixty percent now against you, and I’m sure you don’t want those odds. And if that doesn’t encourage you, let me say this. Anything goes wrong, I’ll punish our mother. So …I’ll leave you to your work. Jeff”—Orson flippantly saluted him—“it’s my brother’s first time, so take it like a man. Don’t beg and plead with him not to shoot you, because you might convince him, and then you’d have to die my way. And I promise you,” he said, smiling at Wilbur, “my way’s a shitty way to die.” Orson stepped out, shut the door, and turned the dead bolt. I was alone with my victim.

Rising, I crossed the floor to the gun, picked it up, and carried it back to the chair. The way Jeff watched me felt unnatural. No one had ever feared me like this.

I sat down to think, my hands sweating onto the metal. Jeff stared at me, and I stared back. Our eyes met, eyes that in another time or place might have been cordial or apathetic, now gravely opposed. This is preventing his torture.

When I stood, my legs jellied, like those nightmares when you have to run, but your legs refuse to work. I walked toward Jeff. It’s for his own good. Be professional, calm, and swift. Even through his pain, Wilbur cursed me under his malodorous breath. Are you actually going to do this?

“A joke?” Jeff laughed strangely. “This is a funny joke. Isn’t this a funny joke, Wilbur? Let’s go now. We have to be at Charlie’s before twelve.”

Lifting the gun in my right hand, I pointed it at Jeff and tried to aim, but my hands shook. I stepped forward so that, despite my trembling, Jeff’s head remained in the sight.

“Don’t shoot my face,” he begged as tears welled up again in his eyes. Jeff knelt down and leaned forward like a Muslim facing Mecca, his dirty blond hair in his eyes, his right arm stretched out, still connected to Wilbur. He touched the skin behind his ear. “Right here,” he said, his voice quaking. “Get close if you have to.”

You aren’t going to do this.

I took a step closer. His face now inches from my boots, he made fists and grunted, preparing to die. With both hands, I steadied the gun, and my finger found the trigger.

I squeezed, but the hammer only clicked.

Jeff gasped.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and as his back heaved up and down from hyperventilation, I stepped back. The cylinder of a Smith & Wesson rotates counterclockwise. Orson had loaded the eleven o’clock chamber instead of the two. You did that on purpose, you bastard. I dropped the round into the hot chamber, put the barrel behind Jeff’s ear, and thumbed back the hammer.

He went limp and rolled onto his left side. I hadn’t heard the gunshot or felt my finger move, but a stream of dark blood flowed fast onto the plastic. In five seconds, it had surrounded Jeff above the shoulders, a crimson halo that reflected the lightbulb redly. I could see into his right eye, open but blank, without soul or will. As the pool expanded across the plastic, Wilbur jerked back, dragging Jeff’s body with him, and shrieking his name. Do not analyze this moment. You couldn’t bear it.

The back door opened, and Orson entered, an expression of awe upon his face as he stared at the plastic. He pulled the Polaroid camera from his pocket, and captured me looking down at Jeff.

“This moment…” he began, but did not finish the thought. His eyes glistened, joyful. “My God, Andy.” He came and took the gun from my hands. Embracing me with tears in his eyes, he rubbed my back. “This is love, Wilbur,” he said. “Real as it gets.” Orson let go and wiped his eyes. “You can go now if you want, Andy,” he said. “You’re welcome to stay, but I know you probably don’t wanna see this. I won’t force you.”

As Orson looked at Wilbur, I could see his mind drift from what I’d done. His preoccupation with his next victim took precedence, and his eyes glazed over with predatory concentration. He walked across the room and returned with the sharpening stone. Then he sat down on the concrete and began sliding the knife blade against the stone, returning it to the razor edge it had held before Shirley Tanner. You killed a human being. No, stop that. Stop thinking.

“Staying or going?” he asked, looking up at me.

“I’m going,” I said, watching Wilbur watch the knife as it scraped across the stone for him. I wondered if Orson would make the knife speech after I left. Orson set the knife on the floor and walked me to the door. When he opened it, I gladly stepped outside. Wilbur strained his neck to see the desert, and Orson noticed.

“You interested in something out here, Wilbur?” he asked, turning around as I stood in the threshold. “Well, take a look,” he said. “Take a long, long look at that night sky, and the stars, and the moon, ’cause you’ll never see them again. Not ever.”

Orson’s icy stare returned to me. “I’ll see you in the morning, brother.”

He slammed the door in my face and locked it. I trudged toward the cabin, the sound of the knife blade on the sharpening stone reaching faintly through the walls.

Ahead the black mass of the cabin pressed against the navy sky. The desert had turned blue again in the moonlight. I thought of my quiet room inside. I would sleep tonight. This staggering numbness was my lifeboat.

As I stepped onto the front porch and reached for the door, the first scream rushed out of the shed and splintered the gentle night. I could not fathom the pain that had inspired it, and as I walked inside and closed the door behind me, I prayed the cabin walls would impede the sound of Orson’s handiwork from reaching my ears.





13



ON the eleventh day, I didn’t leave my room. Orson slipped in during the afternoon. I wasn’t sleeping, though. Since first light, I’d been awake. He brought me a ham sandwich and a glass of port and set them on the bedside table. I lay on my side, facing him, staring into nothing. The despondence that always struck him afterward was evident in his cumbrous eyes and hushed voice.

“Andy,” he said, but I didn’t acknowledge him. “This is part of it. The depression. But you’re prepared for it.” He squatted down and looked into my eyes. “I can help you through it.”

Raindrops ticked on the tin roof. I had yet to get out of bed to look outside, but the light that struggled shyly between the window bars was far from the brilliance of a desert afternoon. Soft and gray, it sulked in the corners. The turpentine fragrance of wet sagebrush perfumed the desert and my room.

“I’m through with you now,” he said. “You can go home.”

A current of hope flowed through me, and I found his eyes.

“When?”

“Pack today, leave tomorrow.” I sat up in bed and set the plate on my lap. “Feel better?” I took a bite of the cold smoked-ham sandwich and nodded. “I thought you would,” he said, moving to the door. As he opened it, a cool draft swirled into my room. “I’m locking the door. I’ll bring you dinner later this evening. The only thing I ask is that you’re packed before you fall asleep tonight.”

When he was gone, I closed my eyes and saw Lake Norman—mosquitoes humming on the surface, a baby blue sky reflected in the mild water. I could smell the pines again, the rich, living soil. The plagiary of mockingbirds and children’s laughter echoing across the lake filled the dead air of the cabin. I could turn this all into a dream. I’m not home yet. My eyes opened again to somber reality—the sound of Orson moving about the cabin, and rain flooding a desert.





Day 11

I’d estimate the hour to be approaching midnight. It’s raining, as it has been all day, and storm clouds have shrouded the moon, so the desert is invisible except when lightning jolts the sky. But it comes without thunder. The heart of the storm is miles away.

My duffel bag is packed. I think Orson’s waiting for me to fall asleep. I’ve heard his footsteps approach my door and stop several times in the last hour, as if he’s listening for the sound of my movement. This makes me a tad nervous, particularly since he’s been so kind today. But strangely enough, I trust him. I can’t explain it, but I don’t think he’ll hurt me, especially after last night. That really touched him.

Hopefully, this is the last entry I’ll ever make in this cabin. Through writing these pages, I saved some degree of sanity and autonomy, but I haven’t written down everything that occurred here. The reason for this is that I intend to forget. Some people find the cravenness to lose entire years of their childhood. They tuck things into their subconscious so that it only eats them away a little at a time, in small, painless bites.

This idea of repression is my model. My goal is to forget the unspeakable events of these past eleven days. I’ll gladly pay the price in episodes of depression, rage, and denial that are destined to plague my coming years. Nothing can be as devastating as the actual memories of what I’ve seen and done.


I signed my name at the bottom of the entry and folded the sheet of notebook paper into thirds. Then I walked to the duffel bag and stuffed it down between the dirty clothes with the other entries I’d saved. Turning out the lantern on the bedside table, I slid under the blanket. Rain on the tin roof was more effective than a bottle of sleeping pills at lulling me to sleep.



Lightning broke the darkness, and I saw the whites of Orson’s eyes. He stood in my room, dripping onto the floor. When the sky went black again, my pulse raced, and I sat up in bed.

“Orson, you’re scaring me.” My voice rose above the tinkling roof.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I came to give you an injection.”

“Of what?”

“Something to help you sleep. Like what you had at the motel.”

“How long have you been standing there?”

“Awhile. I’ve been watching you sleep, Andy.”

“Will you turn the light on, please?”

“I shut the generator off.”

My heart wouldn’t decelerate, so I grabbed a book of matches from the bedside table and lighted the kerosene lantern. As I turned up the flame, the walls warmed, and the terror faded from my heart. He wore jeans and a green poncho, soaking wet.

“I need to give this to you,” he said, showing me the syringe. “It’s time to leave.”

“Is it really necessary?” I asked.

“Extremely.” He took a step closer. “Lift your sleeve.”

Pushing the T-shirt sleeve above my shoulder, I turned my head away as Orson jabbed the needle into my arm. The pain was sharp but brief, and I didn’t feel the needle pull out. When I looked back at Orson, the room had already grown fuzzy, and my head fell involuntarily back onto the pillow.

“You don’t have much time now,” Orson said as my eyelids lowered, his voice as distant as the storm’s thunder. “When you wake, you’ll be in a motel room in Denver, a plane ticket on the dresser, the three-fifty-seven locked up in your duffel bag. At that point, you can know that Mom is safe, and the evidence I have against you is in a secure place, in my possession. You’ve upheld your end of the agreement. I’ll uphold mine.

“I think we’ve passed this stage in our relationship, but I’ll say it once more. Tell no one what you’ve done, where you think you’ve been. Say nothing about me, or Shirley Tanner, or Wilbur and the boys. You were in Aruba the whole time, relaxing. And don’t waste your energy coming back out here to look for me. You may have deduced the location of this cabin, but I assure you I’ll be leaving this desert with you.

“In the coming months, things may happen that you won’t understand, that you may never have dreamed of. But Andy, never forget this: Everything that happens, happens for a reason, and I’ll be in control of that reason. Never doubt that.

“You’ll see me again, though it won’t be for some time. Carry on with your life as before. Guilt will come for you, but you have to beat it back. Write your books, embrace your success, just keep me in the back of your mind.”

His face was blurry, but I thought I saw him smile. The sound of the rain had hushed, and even Orson’s voice, an eloquent, soft-spoken whisper, I could scarcely understand.

“You’re almost gone,” he said. “I see it in your slit eyes. I wanna leave you with something as we say good-bye and you fall into that blissful unconsciousness.

“I know you like poetry. You studied Frost our freshman year of college. I hated him then; I love him now. Especially one poem in particular. The thing about this poem is, everyone thinks it applies to them. It’s recited at graduations and printed in annuals, so as everyone takes the same path, they can claim uniqueness because they love this poem. I’ll shut up now and let Bob put you to sleep.”

My eyes closed, and I couldn’t have opened them had I wanted to. Orson’s voice found my ears, and though I never heard the last line, I couldn’t help thinking as I surrendered to the power of the drug that “The Road Not Taken” was undisputedly his.

“‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler, long I stood and looked down one as far as I could to where it bent in the undergrowth;

‘Then took …as just as fair and having perhaps the better claim because it was grassy and wanted …the passing there had worn them really about the same,

‘And both …in leaves no step had trodden black.…’”





14



WITH the floor space of a coffeehouse, it surprised me that such a crowd had squeezed into 9th Street Books. One of a dying breed of individually owned bookstores, it felt like the library of a mansion. Though two stories high, the second floor existed only as shelf space, and a walkway, ten feet above the floor, circumnavigated the store, lending access to shelf after shelf of elevated books.

Removing my gold-rimmed glasses, I chewed on the rubbery end of an earpiece, leaned forward with my elbows against the wooden lectern, and read the closing sentence from The Scorcher: “‘Sizzle died and went happily to hell.’ Thank you.”

When I closed the book, the crowd applauded. Adrienne Phelps, the proprietor of 9th Street Books, rose from her seat in the front row. “It’s nine o’clock,” she mouthed, tapping her watch. I stepped back from the lectern as the small, thin-lipped woman with short jet black hair and a sweetly menacing face pulled the microphone down to her mouth.

“Unfortunately, we’re out of time,” she told the crowd. “There’s a display up front with Mr. Thomas’s books, and he’s been kind enough to autograph fifty copies of The Scorcher, so those are on sale, too. Let’s give him a big hand.” Turning to me and smiling, she began to clap. The crowd joined in, and for ten seconds the staccato applause filled the old store, the last stop on my twelve-city book tour of the States.

As the crowd dispersed from the store and out onto the street, my literary agent, Cynthia Mathis, left her chair and came across the worn hardwood floor toward me. I dodged an autograph-hungry fan and reached her.

“You outdid yourself tonight, Andy,” she said as we embraced. Wearing a perfume that suggested lilac, Cynthia embodied every quality an elegant, successful New York woman might be thought to possess. At fifty, she hardly looked forty. Her hair, frosting into a misty gray, was long, but she wore it wrapped tightly against the nape of her neck in a chignon. A hint of blush glowed beneath her smooth cheeks, in striking contrast to her black suit.

“It’s so good to see you,” I said as we pulled away. I hadn’t seen Cynthia since before I’d started The Scorcher, and it felt strange to speak to her in person again.

“I got us reservations at Il Piazza,” she said.

“Thank God, I’m starving.” But at least fifty people surrounded us, waiting for a personalized autograph and a few seconds of chitchat. The doors of the bookstore, which led to my supper, seemed miles away, but I reminded myself that this was what I loved, what I’d worked so hard for. So I taped a courteous smile to my face, took a breath, and walked into the waiting crowd, hoping their interest would be short-lived.



The tall Italian sommelier handed me a ruby-stained cork, and I felt for dampness on the end as he poured a little wine into my glass. I swirled it around, took a sip, and when I nodded again, he filled both glasses with a dark amber Latour that had waited fourteen years for this moment.

When the wine steward left, our waiter came and described several dishes in intricate detail. Then he left us with two burgundy menus. Stumbling through the Italian, I sipped the velvety wine and thought of purple grapes ripening in the French countryside, and then subterranean cellars.

Lights from downtown created the calm, glittering ambience of Il Piazza. On the thirty-fifth floor of the Parker-Lewis Building, the restaurant occupied a corner of the skyscraper, so the best tables were positioned along the two walls of windows that peered out upon the city. We sat at one of these candlelit tables, and I stared down at the waters of the East River far below, gliding beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. My eyes followed the lights of a barge drifting upriver against the black current.

“You look tired,” Cynthia said.

I looked up. “I used to love the readings, but they wear on me now. I wanna be home.”

“Andy,” she said, and I could predict by the gravity in her voice what was coming. I knew Cynthia well, and my disappearance in May had shaken her faith in me. “Look, I’ve tried to talk with you about what happened, but you always blow it off as—”

“Cynthia—”

“Andy, if you’ll let me get this off my chest, we can put it aside.” When I didn’t speak, she continued. “You understand what bothered me about you just taking off for the South Pacific?”

“Yes,” I said, stroking the glass stem with my thumb and forefinger.

“If you just up and leave without telling me in the midst of writing a book, I don’t care. I’m not your mother. But you were gone when your book came out. I don’t have to tell you how important it is for you to be around that first week. You’re a visible writer, Andy. It’s the interviews and readings you do then that help create buzz. Initial sales were down from what Blue Murder sold. For a while, it looked like it might flop.”

“Cynthia, I—”

“All I’m saying is, don’t pull that shit again. Aside from the bookstore appearances your publisher canceled, I had to call a lot of media people and tell them why you weren’t coming. I didn’t have a clue. Don’t put me in that position again.” The waiter was walking toward us, but Cynthia waved him off. “God, Andy, you didn’t even call to tell me you were leaving,” she whispered fiercely, her brow furrowed, arms thrown forward in agitation. “How hard is it to pick up a goddamn phone?”

I leaned forward and said calmly, “I was burned-out. I needed a break, and I didn’t feel like calling to ask permission. Now, that was my reasoning then, it was wrong, and I’m sorry. It won’t ever happen again.” She took a long sip of wine. I finished my glass and felt the glow of warmth in my cheeks. Reaching out, I touched her hand. Her eyes gasped.

“Cynthia. I’m sorry, okay? Will you forgive me?”

“You better smooth things with your editor, too.”

“Will you forgive me?”

A faint smile overspread her lips. “Yes, Andy.”

“Good. Let’s order.”



Cynthia had ordered the braised lamb shank with red-pepper sauce, and as the waiter set her plate down, her glassy eyes lit up. Then I watched with pleasure as my main course—mostaccioli, sun-dried tomatoes, capers, and seared bay scallops—was placed before me. Beneath the bed of pasta shimmered a vodka pink sauce. Before leaving, our waiter uncorked a second bottle of Bordeaux and refilled our wineglasses.

The scallops had taken on the flavor of the sweet tomatoes, and as one melted across my tongue, a grain of sand crunched between my molars. I sipped the wine—glimmers of plum, meat, and tobacco. It went down like silk. Experiencing the perfect balance of hunger and its satisfaction, I wanted to linger there as long as possible.

As the night wore on, I became preoccupied with the city. Drinking exceptional wine in one of New York’s finer restaurants, and watching a multitude of lights shining from the skyscrapers and boroughs, is one hell of a way to spend an evening. In the center of the constant twinkling, I knew that millions of people surrounded me, and in this way, the city became inhospitable to the lonely fear that threatened me.

“Andrew?” Cynthia giggled with a feigned English accent. “Too much wine for you.”

Turning slowly from the window to Cynthia, the restaurant swayed with my eyes. I was getting drunk. “That’s a beautiful city,” I said warmly.

“You ought to get a place here.”

“Hell no.”

“Are you implying there’s a problem with my city?”

“I don’t have to imply. I’ll just tell you. You Yankees are in too much of a damn hurry.”

“And that’s an inferior state of existence in comparison to the comatose South?”

“We southerners know the value of an easy day’s work. Don’t fault us for that. I think it’s just a little Yankee jealousy—”

“I find the word Yankee to be an offensive term.”

“That’s ’cause you’ve got a muddled definition in your head.”

“Clarify, please.”

“All right. Yankee: a noun defining anyone who lives north of Virginia, especially rude, anal northerners who talk too damn fast, don’t understand the concept of sweet tea and barbecue, and move to Florida in their golden years.” Cynthia laughed, her brown eyes glistening. I looked into them.

They hemorrhaged, and I turned toward the window, my heart throbbing beneath my oxford shirt and saffron tie.

“Andy?”

“I’m fine,” I said, trying to catch my breath.

“What is it?”

“Nothing.” Staring out the window into Queens, I grasped for composure, telling myself the lie again.

“You seem so different lately,” she said, bringing the wineglass to her lips.

“How so?”

“I don’t know. Since this is the first time we’ve been together in almost a year, it may be an unfair assessment on my part.”

“Please,” I said, stabbing a scallop with my fork, “assess away.”

“Since your vacation, I’ve noticed a change in you. Nothing drastic. But I think I’ve known you long enough to tell when something’s wrong.”

“What do you think is wrong, Cynthia?”

“Difficult to put into words,” she said. “Just a gut feeling. When you called me after you returned this summer, something was different. I assumed you were just dreading the book tour. But I feel the same detached vibe coming from you even now.” I finished another glass of wine. “Talk to me, Andy,” she said. “You still burned-out?”

“No. I know that really worries you.”

“If it’s a woman, tell me and I’ll drop it. I don’t want to pry into your personal—”

“It’s not a woman,” I said. “Look, I’m fine. There’s nothing you can do.”

She lifted her wineglass and looked out the window.

Our waiter came for our plates. He described a diabolical raspberry-chocolate soufflé, but it was late, and I had an 8:30 flight out of La Guardia in the morning. So Cynthia paid the bill, and we rode the elevator down to the street. Nearly midnight. I couldn’t imagine waking in the morning. I’d drunk far too much.

I hailed a cab for Cynthia and kissed her on the cheek before she climbed in. She told me to call her the following week, and I promised I would. As her cab drove away, she stared through the back window, her earnest eyes penetrating me, gnawing at the root of my restlessness.

You have no idea.

When her cab was gone, I started down the sidewalk, and for several blocks, I didn’t pass a soul. Though hidden now from view, the filthy East River flowed into the Atlantic. I could smell the stale, polluted water. Four ambulances rushed by, their sirens shrieking between the buildings. With my hotel only ten blocks north, I hoped a stroll in the cool September night would sober me up.

I dreaded going home. Since mid-June, I’d traveled the country, filling my days with appearances and readings that kept me grounded in the present. I never wanted a moment alone. My thoughts horrified me. Now, as I returned to North Carolina, to a slower way of life, I knew the torture would begin. I had no book to write. There was nothing for me to do but inhabit my lake house. To exist. And it was there, I feared, that the two weeks whose existence I’d denied all summer would come for me.

When my mind drifted back to the desert, I’d force-feed myself the jade green sea, ivory sand, sweaty sunlight. Distinctly, I could picture the stuccoed beach house and veranda where I’d watch bloody sunsets fall into the sea. I was aware of the self-deception, but man will do anything to live with himself.





15



I filled the beginning of October with crisp, clear days on Lake Norman and unbearable nights in my bed. I fished off my pier for an hour each morning and evening. And in the early afternoons, I’d swim, diving beneath the murky blue water, now holding a cool bite with the approach of winter. Sometimes, I’d swim naked just for the freedom of it, like a child in a cold womb, unborn, unknowing. Nearing the surface after a deep dive, I’d pretend that hideous knowledge buried in the recesses of my mind would vanish when I broke into the golden air. It’s only real underwater, I’d think, rising from the lake bottom. The air will cleanse me.

Dawdling on the end of my pier late one afternoon, nursing a Jack and Sun-Drop, I watched a bobber swaying on the surface of the lake. Early Octobers in North Carolina are perfection, and the sky turned azure as the sun edged toward the horizon. I’d been holding a fishing rod, waiting for the red-and-white bobber to duck beneath the water, when I heard footsteps swishing through the grass.

Setting the rod down, I looked back toward the shore and saw Walter step onto the pier. He wore sunglasses and a wheat-colored suit, his jacket thrown over his left shoulder, tie loosened.

For two weeks, I’d been home. Though he called often, I’d spoken to Walter only twice, and the conversations had been vapid on my part. Each time I’d hung up as soon as possible, revealing nothing of my May disappearance and shying away from his questions. Solitude and self-oblivion had been my sole desire, and as I watched my best friend stroll down the pier, his face sullen, I knew I’d hurt him.

Several feet away, he stopped and tossed a manila envelope onto the sun-bleached wood. Walter looked down at me, and I could see myself in his sunglasses. He sat down beside me on the edge of the pier, and our legs dangled out over the water.

“Your novel’s selling well,” he said. “I’m happy for you.”

“It’s a relief.”

As I fumbled with the envelope, Walter said, “I never opened it.”

“You don’t have to tell me that.”

“Something’s on your line.” I grabbed my rod and yanked it back, but the bobber resurfaced without tension in the line. When I reeled it back in, the bobber didn’t move.

“Shit, he was big. That was a large-mouth.” I tossed the rod onto the pier and picked up my drink. “Come on,” I said, standing up. Though the air was mild, the long day of direct sunlight had turned the surface of the pier as hot as summer concrete. It toasted the soles of my feet. “Let’s go inside. I’ll get you a beer.”

In swimming trunks, I ran up the pier toward the shore, leapt into the grass, and waited. Walter came along sluggishly, his usual pace. We walked together up through the yard, a narrow green slope rising from the shore to the house. I hadn’t mown the grass in two weeks, so it rose several inches above my ankles, a soft, dense carpet.

As we climbed the steps to the deck, I glanced into the woods on my right. I thought of the corpse buried out there, the one that had flung my life into this disarray. For a moment, I relived finding her—the smell, the fear, the rush of discovery.

Inside, I got Walter a bottle of beer out of the fridge and led him into the living room. Not quite as soused as I wanted to be, I mixed another Jack and Sun-Drop as he lay down on the sofa.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been over,” I said from the wet bar.

“Book tour wore you out, huh?”

“Just wasn’t in the mood to be in front of people constantly. To be on all the time.” After dropping several shards of ice into the glass and filling it half with citrus soda, half with bourbon, I stirred my drink, walked into the living room, and sat down in the tan leather chair across from Walter.

His eyes caught on Brown No. 2, looking down on us from above the fireplace in all its pretentious glory. He smirked, but the tension between us made him withhold comment.

“I know,” I said, “A real piece of shit. Loman. I’d like to kick that fucker’s ass. Don’t know why I leave it up there. It’s not like it’s growing on me. Fact, I hate it more every day.”

“Deep down, he must’ve known he was a hack. Had to. Should’ve listened to me, man.”

“I know, I know.” I yawned. I’d be passing out when Walter left. “How’s the fam?”

“Ah. The obligatory inquiry. They’re fine. I’ve been trying to spend more time with them lately. Less at the magazine. I’ve actually gotta be at a school play in two hours. Thirty six-year-olds on a stage. Can you imagine?”

“What are they doing?”

“Mamet.” We laughed. We always laughed when we were together. “Poor thing—Jenna’s so nervous about it. She got into bed with Beth and me last night, crying. We fell asleep comforting her. Woke up in a puddle.”

“Ooh,” I shuddered. “The thrill of parenthood. I’d miss it for the world.”

“You serious?” Walter asked, kicking off his wing tips and balancing the bottle on his chest.

“Hell yeah. Everybody feels sorry for me when I tell them I don’t wanna get married or have kids. But it’s not like pathetic resignation. I just happen to know for a fact that there isn’t a single person out there I’d wanna wake up beside day in and day out. Except you, of course. I’d marry you, Walter. Seriously.”

He laughed kindly. “Karen did a number on you, but you won’t always feel bitter.”

“How the hell do you know how I’m always gonna feel?”

“’Cause it’s impossible for someone to go through life without repeatedly falling in love.”

How sad. He really thinks I want his life. He thinks I’m Gatsby to his Daisy. Maybe I am.

“I was in love with Karen,” I said, and a lump swelled in my throat, but I stifled it. “Where did that get me? So I loved her and thought I wanted to spend my life with her. For two years, I felt this way, and suddenly, she didn’t, and wanted nothing to do with me. Not even friendship. Said I was a phase. A fucking phase. That’s two years of my life wasted. I think about what I could’ve written during that time—fucking irks me.” I shook my head and sipped the soured citrus soda. “I’ll tell you—it’ll be a genuine miracle if I ever do get married, ’cause I’m not looking for it. I just don’t think it’ll happen, and after two years of Karen—hell, I’m fine with that. I make a great mate.”

“You bit into a bad apple, and now you think all apples taste that way, but they don’t,” he said with the swagger of someone who knows they’re right.

“Maybe some people just like the taste of rotten apples.” His face dropped. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m being an asshole. I’m just a little shit-faced right now.”

“Hey, people go through phases. Be glad you aren’t a full-time asshole like Bill York.”

“That prick’s still your copyeditor?”

“Yep. He’s such a dick. He was giving me shit today for leaving early.”

“You run the magazine. Fire him.”

“If he wasn’t such a good editor, I’d have canned his ass a long time ago. But I don’t pay him to be a decent human being. Long as he keeps the text grammatically perfect, he can be the Prince of Darkness.”

“God, I admire your principle.” We laughed again. There was a brief period of silence, but because it followed laughter, it elapsed unstrained. Walter looked up at me from his beer.

“Andy,” he said, “wanna tell me what’s going on?”

I looked into Walter’s eyes, and I wanted to spill everything. The urge to tell another human being where I’d been and what I’d done was overwhelming.

“I just don’t know.”

“It has to do with that trip you took last May?”

I held my breath, thinking. “I guess you could say that.”

“Is it taxes?” he asked. “You in trouble with the IRS? That’s no shit.”

“Of course not.” I laughed.

“What can’t you trust me with?” His eyes narrowed, and I shrugged. “So talk to me.”

“You willing to chance prison, or your personal safety, to know what happened to me?”

He sat up and set his half-empty bottle on the floor. “I know you’d do it for me.”

My stomach contracted at the thought of the desert. I finished my drink and looked into his hazel eyes. His gray hair had grown out considerably since May. “You know I have a twin?”

“You’ve mentioned it. He disappeared, right?”

“We were twenty. Just walked out of our dorm room one night. Said, ‘You won’t see me for a while.’”

“Bet that was hard.”

“Yeah, it was hard. He contacted me last May. Walter, you can’t tell anyone. Not Beth, not—”

“Who am I going to tell?”

“You remember that black teacher who went missing last spring?”

“Rita Jones?”

I swallowed. You say it now, he’s involved. Think about it. You’re too hammered to make this decision.

“She’s buried in my woods.” Walter’s face blanched. “My brother, Orson, put her there. He blackmailed me. Told me my blood was all over her and that the knife he killed her with was hidden in my house. Swore he’d call the police if I didn’t come see him. Threatened my mother.”

“You’re drunk.”

“Wanna see the body?”

Walter stared at me, eyes laced with doubt. “He killed her?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“He’s a psychopath,” I said, steadying my hands.

“What’d he want with you?” Tears welled up in my eyes, and I couldn’t stop them. They spilled down my cheeks, and as I wiped them away and looked up at Walter, my eyes filled again.

“Horrible,” I said, my lips quivering as tears ran over them and down my chin.

“Where’d you go?”

“The Wyoming desert.”

“Why?” I didn’t answer him, and Walter allowed me a moment to regain my composure. He didn’t ask why again. “Where is he now?”

“I don’t know. Could be anywhere in the country.”

“You never went to the police?”

“He threatened my mother!” My voice rose into the second floor. “Besides, what would I say? ‘My twin brother killed Rita Jones and buried her in my backyard. Oh, by the way, my blood’s all over her, she was murdered with my paring knife, and my brother’s disappeared, but I swear I didn’t do it!’”

“What other choice do you have?” he asked. I shrugged. “Well, if what you’re saying is true, people will continue to die until he’s caught. It could be Beth or John David next. That doesn’t concern you?”

“What concerns me,” I said, “is that even if I could find Orson, haul him into a precinct, and tell the detectives what he’d done, Orson would walk out the free man. I have no proof, Walter. It means shit in a court of law that I know Orson is a psychopath, that I’ve seen him torture and murder. What matters is that Rita Jones is covered in my blood.”

“You’ve seen him murder?” Walter asked. “Actually watched him kill?” Tears came to my eyes again. “Who did he—”

“I don’t wanna talk about it anymore.”

“But you’re telling me you—”

“I won’t talk about it!” Leaving the chair, I walked to the window, which looked across the lawn and, farther down, the lake. On the forest’s edge, yellow poplars had begun to turn gold, and scarlet oaks and red maples would soon set the woods ablaze with their dying leaves. My forehead against the window, my tears streaked down the glass, leaving blurry trails in their wake.

“What can I do?” Walter asked, his voice gentle again.

I shook my head. I murdered, too. Cut out a woman’s heart and shot a man in the head, because Orson told me to. The words ricocheted inside my head, but I couldn’t tell Walter what I’d done. Somehow, I thought it’d be enough that he knew about Orson and where I’d been.

“I have nightmares every night. I can’t write. The things I saw…”

“You have to talk to someone. Something like this could fuck you over for—”

“I’m talking to you,” I said, watching a boat drag an inner tube across the lake and wondering what really was coursing through Walter’s mind.

He came to the window, and we both leaned against the glass.

“She’s right out there,” I said, pointing toward the woods. “In a shallow grave.”

We stood for ages by the window. I thought he might push for more details, but he kept the silence, and I was grateful.

It was soon time for him to leave. He had his daughter’s play to attend. I pictured Jenna onstage, Walter and Beth in the audience, beaming. I swear it only lasted a second, but I was gorged with envy.





16



JEANETTE Thomas lived alone in a dying neighborhood in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in the same ranch-style house where her sons had grown up and her husband had died. It had been a thriving middle-class neighborhood when I was a child, but now as I drove my red CJ-7 slowly along Race Street, I marveled at how the area had changed. Rusted chain-link fences enclosed the yards, and some of the homes were derelict. It seemed as if an elderly person sat in a rocking chair on every front porch, waving at the infrequent cars that passed through. This neighborhood served as the final zone of independence for many of its residents, most only several years from a nursing home existence.

Approaching my mother’s house, I couldn’t help but ruminate on what this place had once been. In my childhood, kids had filled the streets, and I saw them now, riding bicycles and scrap-wood contraptions, laughing, fighting, chasing the ice-cream truck as it made the rounds on a sweltering summer afternoon. A wonderland, shrouded in shady green trees and electric with youthful energy, it had been mine and Orson’s world. We’d climbed its trees, navigated the cool darkness of the drainage ditches, and explored the forbidden woods that bordered the north side of the neighborhood. We’d formed secret clubs, constructed rickety tree houses, and smoked our first cigarette here on a deserted baseball diamond one winter night. Because it was the only home of my childhood, the memories were thick and staggering. They overcame me every time I returned, and now that this neighborhood had become a ghost town, my childhood felt far more spectacular. The present listless decay made my memories rich and resplendent.

My mother always parked her car at the bottom of the driveway so she wouldn’t back over the mailbox. When I saw her car edged slightly into the street, I smiled and parked near the curb in front of her house. I cut off the Jeep and opened the door to the grating whine of a leaf blower. Stepping outside, I slammed the door.

Across the street, an old man sat in a chair on his front porch, smoking a pipe and watching a crew of teenagers blow the leaves on his lawn into a brown pile. He waved to me, and I waved back. Mr. Harrison. We were twelve when we learned about your subscription to Playboy. Stole the magazine for three consecutive months. Checked your mailbox every day for its delivery when we got home from school. You caught us the fourth month. Peeped from behind your curtain for a whole week, waiting to identify the thieves. Came tearing out of the house, fully intent on dragging us to our mother, until you realized she’d know you were a dirty old man. “Well, you got three of ’em already!” you shouted, then whispered, “I’ll leave ’em on my back porch when I’m through. How about that? At least let me get my money’s worth.” That was fine by us.

“Hey!” a man shouted from a gray Honda that had stopped in the middle of the street. I stepped back down off the curb and walked toward the car.

“Can I help you with something?” I asked. I placed him at twenty-six or twenty-seven. His hair was very black, and his razor-thin face was baby ass–smooth and white. The interior of his car reeked of Windex. I didn’t like his eyes.

“Are you Andrew Thomas?” he asked.

Here we go.

Since the publication of my first novel, I’d kept a running count—excluding conferences, literary festivals, and other publicized appearances, this was the thirty-third time I’d been recognized.

I nodded. “No way! I’m reading your book right now. Um, The Incinerator—no, ah, I know what it’s called.…”

“The Scorcher.”

“That’s it. I love it. In fact, I’ve got it with me. Do you think that, um, that…”

“Would you like for me to sign it?”

“Would you?”

“Be happy to.” He reached onto the floorboard in the back, grabbed my newest hardcover, and handed it to me. I guess I just look like I have a pen on me. Sometimes it was disappointing meeting the fans. “You got a pen?” I asked.

“Shit, I don’t—oh, wait.” He opened the glove compartment and retrieved a short, dull pencil. He’d played miniature golf recently. As I took the pencil, I glanced at the jacket of The Scorcher—an evil smiling face, consumed in flames. I hadn’t been particularly pleased with this jacket design, but no one cares what the author thinks.

“You want me just to sign it?” I asked.

“Could you do it to …sign it to my girlfriend?”

“Sure.” Are you gonna tell me her name, or do I have to ask? …I have to ask. “What’s her name?”

“Jenna.”

“J-E-N-N-A?”

“Yep.” I set my book on the roof of his car and scribbled her name and one of the three dedications I always use: “To Jenna—may your hands tremble and your heart pound. Andrew Z. Thomas.” I closed the book and returned it. “She’s gonna love this,” he said, shifting the car back into drive. “Thank you so much.” I shook his cold, thin hand and stepped back over the curb.

As he drove away, I walked through my mother’s uncut grass toward the front door. A gusty wind passed through the trees and tickled my spine. The morning sky was overcast, filled with bumpy mattresslike clouds, which in the coming months might be filled with snow. In the center of her lawn, against the ashen late-October sky, a silver maple exploded in burnt orange.

As I continued through the grass, the appearance of her house grew dismal. Beginning to pull away from the roof, the gutters overflowed with leaves, and the siding had peeled and buckled. Even the yard had turned into a jungle, and I didn’t doubt Mom had fired the lawn service I’d hired for her. She’d been infuriatingly stubborn in her refusal to accept any degree of financial assistance. I’d tried to buy her a new house after The Killer and His Weapon was sold to Hollywood, but she refused. She wouldn’t let me pay her bills, buy her a car, or even send her on a cruise. Whether it was her pride or just ignorance concerning how much money I made, I wasn’t sure, but it irritated me to no end. She insisted on scraping by with Social Security, her teacher’s pension, and the tiny chunk of Dad’s life insurance, now almost gone.

I stepped up onto the front porch and rang the doorbell. Bob Barker’s voice from The Price Is Right escaped through a cracked window. I heard my mother dragging a stool across the floor so she could reach the peephole.

“It’s me, Mom,” I said through the door.

“Andrew, is that you?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Three dead bolts turned, and it opened.

“Darling!” Her face brightened—a cloud unveiling the sun. “Come in,” she said, smiling. “Give your mom a hug.” I stepped inside and we embraced. At sixty-five, she seemed to grow smaller every time I visited. Her hair was turning white, but she wore it long, as she always had, pulled back in a ponytail. Though too big for her now, a green dress dotted with white flowers hung upon her feeble frame like outdated wallpaper.

“You look good,” she said, inspecting my waist. “I see you lost that spare tire.” Smiling, she pinched my stomach. She had a paralyzing fear I’d suddenly gain six hundred pounds and become trapped in my house. It was hell being around her if I was the slightest bit overweight. “I told you it wouldn’t take much to lose those love handles. They’re really not attractive, you know. That’s what happens when you spend all your time inside, writing.”

“The yard doesn’t look good, Mom,” I said, walking into the living room and sitting down on the sofa. She walked to the television and turned the volume all the way down. “Is that lawn service not coming anymore?”

“I fired them,” she said, blocking the screen, hands on her hips. “They charged too much.”

“You weren’t paying for it.”

“I don’t need your help,” she said. “And I’m not gonna argue with you about it. I wrote a check to you for the money you gave me. Remind me to give it to you before you leave.”

“I won’t take it.”

“Then the money will go to waste.”

“But the yard looks terrible. It needs to be—”

“That grass is gonna turn brown and die anyway. No need to make a fuss about it now.”

I sighed and leaned back against the dusty, sunken sofa as my mother disappeared into the kitchen. The house smelled of must, aged wood, and tarnished silverware. Above the brick fireplace hung a family portrait that had been taken the summer after Orson and I graduated from high school. The picture was sixteen years old, and it showed. The background had reddened, and our faces looked more pink than flesh-colored.

I remembered the day distinctly. Orson and I had fought about who would wear Dad’s brown suit. We’d both become fixated on it, so Mom had flipped a dime, and I won. Furious, Orson had refused to have his picture taken, so Mom and I went alone to the photographer’s studio. I wore my father’s brown suit, and she wore a purple dress, black now in the discolored photograph. It was eerie to look at my mother and myself standing there alone, with the plain red background behind us, half a family. Sixteen years later, nothing has changed.

She came back into the living room from the kitchen, carrying a glass of sweet tea.

“Here you are, darling,” she said, handing me the cold, sweaty glass. I took a sip, savoring her ability to brew the best tea I’d ever tasted. It held the perfect sweetness—not bitter, not weak, and the color was transparent mahogany. She sat down in her rocking chair and pulled a quilt over her skinny legs, the wormy veins hidden by fleshy panty hose.

“Why haven’t you come in four months?” she asked.

“I’ve been busy, Mom,” I said, setting the tea down on a glass coffee table in front of the couch. “I had the book tour and other stuff, so I haven’t been back in North Carolina that long.”

“Well, it hurts my feelings that my son won’t take time out of his high-and-mighty schedule to come visit his mother.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I really feel bad.”

“You should be more considerate.”

“I will. I’m sorry.”

“Stop saying that,” she snapped. “I forgive you.” Then turning back to the television, she said, “I bought your book.”

“You didn’t have to buy it, Mom. I have thirty copies at home. I could’ve brought one.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“You read it?”

She frowned, and I knew the answer. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings,” she said, “but it’s just like your other ones. I didn’t even reach the end of the first chapter before I put it down. You know I can’t stand profanity. And that Sizzle was just horrible. I’m not gonna read about a man going around setting people on fire. I don’t know how you write it. People probably think I abused you.”

“Mom, I—”

“I know you write what sells, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m gonna like it. I just wish you’d write something nice for a change.”

“Like what? What would you like for me to write?”

“A love story, Andrew. Something with a happy ending. People read love stories, too, you know.”

I laughed out loud and lifted up the glass. “So you think I should switch to romance? My fans would love that, let me tell you.”

“Now you’re just being ugly,” she said as I sipped the tea. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Mocking your own mother.”

“I’m not mocking you, Mom. I think you’re hilarious.”

She frowned again and looked back at the television. Though strong-willed and feisty, my mother was excruciatingly sensitive beneath her fussy exterior.

“Have you been to Dad’s grave yet?” she asked after a moment.

“No. I wanted to go with you.”

“There were flowers by the headstone this morning. A beautiful arrangement. It looked fresh. You sure you didn’t—”

“Mom, I think I’d know if I laid flowers on Dad’s grave this morning.”

Her short-term memory was wilting. She’d probably taken the flowers there yesterday.

“Well, I was there this morning,” she said. “Before it clouded up. Sat there for about an hour, talking to him. He’s got a nice spot under that magnolia.”

“Yes, he does.”

Staring into the olive shag carpet beneath my feet, at the sloped dining room table next to the kitchen, and that first door in the hallway leading down into the basement, I sensed the four of us moving through this dead space, this antiquated haunt—felt my father and Orson as strongly as I did my mother, sitting in the flesh before me. Strangely enough, it was the smell of burned toast that moved me. My mother loved scorched bread, and though the scent of her singed breakfast was now a few hours old, it made this deteriorating house my home, and me her little boy again, for three inexorable seconds.

“Mom,” I began, and I almost said his name. Orson was on the tip of my tongue. I wanted her to remind me that we’d been carefree children once, kids who’d played.

She looked up from the muted television.

But I didn’t ask. She’d driven him from her mind. When I’d made the mistake of talking about him before, she had instantly shut down. It crushed her that he’d left, that thirteen years ago Orson had severed all ties from our family. Initially, she dealt with that pain by denying he’d ever been her son. Now, years later, that he’d ever been born.

“Never mind,” I said, and she turned back to the game show. So I found a memory for myself. Orson and I are eleven, alone in the woods. It’s summertime, the trees laden with leaves. We find a tattered canvas tent, damp and mildewed, but we love it. Brushing out the leaves from inside, we transform it into our secret fort, playing there every day, even in the rain. Since we never tell any of the neighborhood kids, it’s ours alone, and we sneak out of the house at night on several occasions and camp there with our flashlights and sleeping bags, hunting fireflies until dawn. Then, running home, we climb into bed before Mom or Dad wakes up. They never catch us, and by summer’s end, we have a jelly jar full of prisoners—a luciferin night-light on the toy chest between our beds.

Mom and I sat watching the greedy contestants until noon. I kept the memory to myself.

“Andrew,” she said when the show had ended, “is it still cold outside?”

“It’s cool,” I said, “and a little breezy.”

“Would you take a walk with me? The leaves are just beautiful.”

“I’d love to.”

While she went to her bedroom for an overcoat, I stood and walked through the dining room to the back door. I opened it and stepped onto the back porch, its green paint flaking off everywhere, the boards slick with paint chips.

My eyes wandered through the overgrown yard, alighting on the fallen swing we’d helped my father build. He would not be proud of how I’d cared for his wife. But she’s stubborn as hell, and you knew it. You knew it better than anyone. Leaning against the railing, I looked thirty yards beyond, staring into the woods, which started abruptly where the grass ended.

Something inside of me twitched. It was as though I were seeing the world as a negative of a photograph—in black and gray, two boys rambling through the trees toward something I could not see. A fleeting image struck me—a cigarette ember glowing in a tunnel. There was a presence in the forest, in my head, and it bowled me over.

I could not escape the idea that I’d forgotten something.





17



I left my mother’s house before dusk, and for the forty miles of back roads between Winston-Salem and my lake house near Davidson, I thought of Karen. Normally, I’d banish her from my thoughts at the first flicker of a memory, but tonight I allowed her to remain, and watching the familiar roads wind between stands of forest and breaks of pasture, I imagined she sat beside me in the Jeep.

We ride home in one of those comfortable stretches of silence, and within an hour, we’re walking together through the front door of my house. You throw your coat on the piano bench, and as I head for the kitchen for a bottle of wine, I catch your eyes, and see that you could care less about wine tonight. So without music, or candles, or freshening up, we walk upstairs to my bedroom and make love and fall asleep and wake up and go again and fall back asleep. I wake up once more in the night, feel you breathing beside me, and smile at the thought of making us breakfast. You’re excellent company in the morning, over coffee, in our robes, the lake shimmering in early sun.…

I was speaking aloud to an empty seat, with Davidson still fifteen miles away.

Last I heard, Karen was reading manuscripts for a small house in Boston and living with a patent attorney. They were going to be married in Bermuda over Christmas. Try this, Andy: Around 8:30, you’ll unlock the front door, walk into your house, and go straight upstairs to bed. Alone. You won’t even feel like a drink.



I awoke to the earsplitting scream of the stereo system in my living room downstairs, the speakers pumping Miles Davis through the house at full volume. It was two o’clock in the morning. I remained motionless under the covers, in utter darkness, thinking, Someone is in the house. If you turn on the light, you’ll see him standing at the end of your bed, and if you move, he’ll know you’re awake and kill you. Please God, let this be a power surge, or something fucked up in the circuitry. But I don’t own a Miles Davis record.

As the music rattled the windows, I reached my left hand to the bedside table and opened the drawer, expecting at any moment for lights to blind me, followed by the immediate onset of unthinkable pain. My hand touched my new pistol, a subcompact .40-caliber Glock. I couldn’t remember if I’d chambered the first round, so I brought the handgun under the sheet and, pulling back on the slide, felt the semijacketed hollow-point poke out of the ejection port, ready to fire.

For two minutes, I lay in bed, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness. Then, squinting so he wouldn’t see the whites of my eyes, I scoped out my room: At a glance, I seemed to be the only occupant. Unless he’s in the closet. Rolling to the other side of the bed, I lifted the phone to dial 911. Miles blared through the receiver. Oh Jesus.

I planted my feet on the carpet and crept toward the door, thinking, Don’t go down there. Orson could be anywhere in this house. I know it’s him. Please be dreaming.

The exposed second-floor hallway ran the length of the living room, with my bedroom at the end. At my door, I stopped and peered down the empty hallway. Too dark to see anything in the living room below. I did, however, notice the red and green stereo lights glowing by the staircase. Through the tall living room windows, I could see the woods, the lake, and that remote blue light at the end of Walter’s pier. I might die tonight.

Finger on the light switch, I couldn’t decide whether or not to turn on the track lighting in the hallway. Maybe he doesn’t know I’m up yet. I won’t alert him to the fact.

There were three open doors leading into black rooms along the right side of the hall, the oak banister on the left. My heart clanged like a blacksmith’s hammer. Get to the staircase. I sprinted down the hall as “So What” masked my footsteps. Crouching at the top of the staircase, freezing sweat burning in my eyes, I stared through the banister at the expansive living room—the couch, the baby grand, the wet bar, the hearth—ambiguous oblique forms in the shadows below. Then there were the places I could not see—the kitchen, the foyer, my study. He could be anywhere. Resisting waves of hysterical trembling, so intense that I kept my finger off the trigger, I thought, He’s doing this for the fear. That’s what gets him off.

Anger displaced my terror. I stood up, charged down the staircase, and ran into the living room.

“Orson!” I screamed above the music. “Do I look scared? COME ON!”

I moved to the stereo and cut it off. The gaping silence engulfed me, so I turned on a lamp beside the stereo, and the soft, warm light it produced eased my heart. I listened, looked, heard and saw nothing, took five deep breaths, and leaned against the wall to tame my renascent fear. Go out through the kitchen and onto the deck. Get away from here. Maybe he’s just fucking with you. Maybe he’s already gone.

As I started for the back door, something in the bay-windowed alcove between the kitchen and the living room arrested my exit. An unmarked videotape stood atop the glass breakfast table. Picking it up, I again glanced over my shoulder at the hallway above and then into the foyer. Still nothing moved. I wanted to search my study and the three guest rooms on the second floor, but I didn’t have the equanimity to roam my house, knowing he skulked in some corner or nook, waiting for me to stumble blindly past.

Returning to the stereo and the entertainment center, I inserted the videotape into my VCR, turned on the television, and sat down on the sofa so I could watch the screen and still see most of the living room.

The screen is blue, then black. The date and time emerge in the bottom right-hand corner: 10/30/96, 11:08 a.m. That’s today. No, yesterday now.

I hear a voice, then two voices, so low and muffled that I turn up the volume.

“Would you like for me to sign it?” …“Would you?” …“Be happy to.” …“You got a pen?” …“Shit, I don’t— oh, wait” …“You want me just to sign it?” …“Could you do it to …sign it to my girlfriend?” …“Sure.” …“What’s her name?” …“Jenna.” …“J-E-N-N-A?” …“Yep.” …“She’s gonna love this. Thank you so much.”

The screen still dark, the sound of a car engine vibrates the television set, and then the first shot appears—through the back window of a moving car and from a few hundred feet away—me walking up the steps to my mother’s house. The screen goes black and silent.

Still 10/30/96, now 11:55 a.m. The picture fades in, and the camera slowly pans a dark room. Oh God. Concrete walls and floor. The objects in the room are the giveaway: two red bicycles, a dilapidated exercise trampoline, a fake white Christmas tree, mountains of cardboard boxes, and several stacks of records—the small windowless basement of my mother’s house.

The cameraman holds on a shot of the fourteen steps that lead upstairs, and then the picture jerks nauseatingly as he ascends. The first hallway door creaks open, and the camera zooms in on my face as I sit quietly on my mother’s couch, watching the muted television. “Such a good son to visit her,” he whispers. Then the cameraman closes the door and tiptoes back down the steps.

After placing the camera atop a stack of our father’s records, Orson squats down in front of it, the staircase behind him now, and the screen blackens.

The picture returns from the same position in the basement—10/30/96, 7:25 p.m. Orson leans into the lens and whispers, “You just left, Andy.” He smiles. He wears a mechanic’s suit, though I can’t tell its color in the poor basement light. “I don’t want you to worry, Andy,” he whispers. “This following you around thing is quite temporary. In fact, as you watch this now in your living room around two in the morning, I’ll be hundreds of miles away, driving into the capital of this great nation. And when I finish there, I’ll be blending back into the faceless masses for a good long while.” Orson sneezes twice.

“Because you can’t keep your mouth shut, I’m considering having a friend of mine visit Walter and his beautiful family. Would that upset you? I think you’ve met Luther.” He smiles. “He’s a fan.” Orson pulls a length of wire from his pocket. “In one minute, it’ll occur to you that you have this all on tape. Well, you had it all on tape. Remember that. Shall we?” Orson lifts the camera and continues to whisper as he climbs the staircase. “The rage you’re about to feel will liberate you, Andy. Think of it that way. Oh, one last thing—watch the news tomorrow morning.”

He opens the door to the hallway. Somewhere in the house, my mother is singing. Orson slams the door, opens it, and slams it again before rushing back down the steps. Setting the camera back on the stack of records, he moves offscreen, somewhere in the semidarkness, amid the innumerable boxes. I have only a view of the staircase now and a section of the bare concrete wall.

Silence. At the top of the steps, the door opens.

“Andrew, did you come back in?” My mother’s voice fills the basement, and I begin to tremble, my head shaking involuntarily back and forth. Descending five steps, she stops, and I can see her legs now. I’m muttering, “No” continuously, as if it will drive her back up those steps.

“Andrew?” she calls out. No answer. After three more steps, she leans down so that she can see into the basement. She inspects the rows of clutter for several seconds, then straightens up and clumps back up the staircase. But her footsteps stop before she reaches the door, and she goes back down again to where she was and looks directly into the camera. I see the confusion on her face, but it’s not yet accompanied by fear.

My mother walks carefully to the bottom of the staircase and stops before the camera. She’s still wearing that green dress, but her white hair is down now. She stares curiously into the lens, that sharp crease wrinkling up between her eyebrows.

“HI, MOM!” Orson screams. She looks behind the camera. The fear in her face destroys me, and as she shrieks and runs for the staircase, the camera crashes to the concrete floor.



After the screen turned blue again, I sat for five seconds in unholy shock. He did not kill our mother. He did …I smelled Windex. A hard metallic object thumped the back of my skull.



Lying on my back beside the couch and staring up through the windows, I saw that morning was now just a few hours away—that purple-navy tinge of dawn leeching the darkness from the sky. As I struggled to my feet, the tender knot on the back of my head throbbed on mercilessly.

The television was still on. Kneeling down, I pressed the eject button on the VCR, but the tape had already been removed.

After hanging up the phone in the kitchen, I trudged up the steps to my bedroom. I returned the Glock to the drawer and lay down on top of the covers, bracing myself for the tsunami of despair to consume me. I closed my eyes and tried to cry, but the pain was too intense, too surreal. Could this have been a new nightmare? Maybe I walked down there in my sleep and banged my head. Dreamed a fucked-up dream. That is a possibility. Hold on to that. She’s sleeping. I could call her now and wake her up. She’ll answer the phone, peeved at my rudeness. But she’ll answer the phone, and that’s all that matters.

In darkness, I reached for the phone and dialed my mother’s number.

It rang and rang.





18



ON a cold, clear Halloween morning, the world watched Washington, D.C., as city police, FBI, Secret Service, and a myriad of media swarmed the White House. It had begun before dawn.

At 4:30 a.m., a jogger running down East Street noticed a pile of cardboard boxes stacked in the frosty grass of the Ellipse, close to the site of the national Christmas tree. Upon returning home, she called 911.

By the time the police arrived, the Secret Service was already on the scene, and suspicion immediately arose that the boxes might contain explosives. So the president was flown to a safe location, the White House staff evacuated, and the quarter-mile stretch of East Street behind the White House occluded.

In Washington, bad news travels fast. By eight o’clock, local and network news crews were camped along the perimeter that the police had established two hundred yards from the boxes. The story broke on every news channel in the country, so by nine o’clock, as a bomb-squad robot rolled toward the portentous heap of cardboard boxes, the world was watching.

For two hours, cameras zoomed in on technicians in bomb-resistant suits as they utilized the robot and X-ray unit to investigate each cardboard box. When a box had been cleared, it was set inside an armored truck. Each was opened, but the cameras were too far away to determine what, if anything, was inside. There were at least a dozen boxes, and the bomb squad treated each one as if it contained a nuclear bomb. Their precision made the task tedious, and eleven o’clock had passed before the last box was cleared and the armored truck drove away.

Speculation began. What was inside the boxes if not a bomb? A hoax? An assassination attempt on the president? Rumors and unconfirmed reports swirled through the coverage until a statement was issued by the FBI at 1:30 as East Street reopened.

Special Agent Harold Trent addressed the nation of reporters, speaking into a cluster of microphones, the back side of the White House visible behind him beneath the late October sky. Twelve boxes, most between one and three cubic feet in volume, had been taken into possession by the FBI. No explosive devices had been found. Inside each box was what appeared to be a human heart and a corresponding name.

The reporters fired questions: Were the names those of real people? Would the names be released? Were there any suspects? Why were the boxes left near the White House? Agent Trent refused to theorize. The investigation had only begun, and a special FBI task force would be assembled to work with state and local police until the person or persons responsible had been taken into custody.

Agent Trent took a deep breath, his exhaustion already evident on the screen that transported his image into my living room. He looked into the cameras and spoke words that would be repeatedly broadcast as sound bites in the coming days.

“There’s a long road ahead of us,” he said. “It’ll take some time to verify if these are actually the hearts of missing persons or known murder victims. I pray it’s not the case, but this appears to be the work of a serial murderer. And if it is, he’ll continue to kill until he’s caught.” The sturdy black agent walked away from the microphones as reporters shouted questions that he ignored.

The nation was captivated, and the media fueled its obsession. Rampant speculation ignited as the country fell in love with its own fear. Even before the FBI confirmed that the hearts represented actual murders, the media had conceived and birthed a monster.

To the dismay of doctors, they would call him “the Heart Surgeon,” the professional title marred from that day forward. No one could say the words without provoking images of FBI agents and the Washington, D.C., bomb squad loading cardboard boxes, the work of a madman, into an armored truck.

How strange it felt to be the only one who knew.





19



MIST whipped my face as my boat crawled toward the middle of the lake. I could hear nothing over the gurgling clatter of the outboard motor mounted to the stern of my leaky rowboat. The evening sky threatened rain as I glided across the leaden chop, scanning the empty lake for Walter’s boat.

A half mile out from my pier, I cut the motor. The cold, darkening silence closed in on me, and I wondered if I’d make it home before the rain set in. Though I despised coming out on the lake, I couldn’t speak to Walter in my house anymore without fear that Orson was eavesdropping.

I heard the groan of Walter’s boat before I saw it. My nerves took over, and I regretted not having knocked back several stiff drinks to facilitate what I had to tell him. Walter pulled his equally powerless rowboat beside mine, tossed over a rope, and I tied us together.

“What’s up?” he asked when he’d killed the motor.

“You see the news?”

“Yeah.”

He pulled a pack of Marlboro Lights from his brown raincoat and slid a cigarette into his mouth. From a pocket on my blue raincoat, I tossed him a butane cigar lighter. “Thanks,” he said, blowing a puff of smoke out of the corner of his mouth and throwing the lighter back to me. “The media’s tickled pink,” he said. “You can see it in their ambitious little faces. I’ll bet they blew their load when they got the tip.”

“Think they were tipped, huh?”

“Oh, whoever planted those boxes knew exactly what they were doing. Probably called a dozen newspapers and TV stations after the drop. I’ll bet he told them there was a bomb behind the White House. Then that jogger called nine-one-one, confirming the story, and boom …media frenzy.” Walter took a long drag from his cigarette and spoke as the smoke curled from his mouth. “Yeah, the only person happier about those hearts than the press is the sick fuck who left them there. He’s probably sitting in front of a TV right now, jacking off, watching the nation drool over his—”

“It’s Orson,” I said. Walter took in a mouthful of smoke, attempting to look unfazed.

“How do you know?” he asked, coughing a little as he exhaled.

“He keeps the hearts. In his cabin in Wyoming, there was a freezer full of them. They’re his trophies, his little keepsakes.”

“Andy…”

“Just listen for a minute, Walter.”

A gust banged our boats together, and a raindrop hit my face.

How do you tell a man you’ve endangered his wife and children?

“The thing in Washington,” I said, “is small potatoes. My mother’s dead. Orson strangled her last night. He videotaped it.…It’s…” I stopped to steady myself. “I’m sorry. But I think I’ve put you in danger.” His head tilted questioningly. “I don’t know how, but Orson knows or suspects that I told you about the desert.”

“Oh Christ.” Walter flicked his cigarette into the water, and it hissed as he put his face into his hands.

“I should never have told you anything about—”

“You’re goddamn right you shouldn’t have.”

“Look—”

“What did he say?”

“Walter—”

“What the fuck did he say?” His voice rang out across the lake. A fish splashed in the water nearby.

“The exact words aren’t—”

“Fuck you.” He wiped the tears from his face. “What did he say?” I shook my head. “Did he mention my family?” Tears, the first of the day, streamed from my eyes as I nodded. “He mentioned my family?” Walter hyperventilated.

“I am so—”

“How could you let this happen, Andy?”

“I didn’t mean—”

“What did your brother say? I want to know each word, each syllable, verbatim, and I dare you to say exact words aren’t important. Tell me!”

“He said because I can’t keep my mouth shut…” I closed my eyes. I want to die.

“Finish it!”

“He was considering having a friend of his come visit you. And your ‘beautiful family.’”

Walter looked back toward his pier and his house, concealed behind the orange leaves. It was drizzling now, so I pulled up the hood of my rain jacket. An inch of water had collected in my boat.

“Who’s his friend?” he asked.

“I have no idea.”

“Is this—” He started to hyperventilate again.

“Walter, I’m gonna take care of this.”

“How?”

“I’m gonna kill Orson.”

“So you do know where he is?”

“I have an idea.”

“Tip the FBI.”

“No. Orson can still send me to prison. I’m not going to prison.”

Our boats rocked on the rough water. I felt queasy.

“If I find Orson,” I said, “will you come with me?”

“To help you kill him?”

“Yes.”

He guffawed sardonically. “Is this real? I mean, are you off your rocker?”

“Feels that way.”

The drizzle had become rain. I shivered.

“I have to get home,” he said. “I’ve gotta take John David and Jenna trick-or-treating.”

“Will you come with me?” I asked again.

“Take a wild guess.”

“I understand.”

“No. No, you don’t. You don’t understand anything.” He started to cry again, but he managed to hold himself together for another moment. “Let’s get something straight, all right? Don’t call me. Don’t come to my house. Don’t e-mail me. Don’t think about me. Don’t do one goddamn thing that would make this monster think we’re friends. We clear?”

“Yes, Walter. I want you to—”

“Don’t you say another word to me. Give me the rope.”

I untied our rowboats and cast the end of the rope to him. He cranked the outboard motor and chugged away, making a wide circle back toward his pier.

It was nearly dark, and the rain fell steadily and hard into the lake. I started the motor and pressed on toward my pier. Were the safety of Walter and his family not in question, I would have been heading home to kill myself.





20



THE walls of my office consist almost entirely of windows, and because the room juts out from the rest of my house into the trees, I feel as though I spend my hours writing in a piedmont forest. My desk is pushed against the largest wall of glass, facing the forest, so that nothing but an occasional doe or gray fox distracts me from my work. I can’t even see the lake from my desk, and this is by design, because the water mesmerizes me and would only steal my time.

Books abound, stacked on disorganized shelves and lying in piles on the floor. In one corner, there’s an intimidating stack of manuscripts from fans and blurb-seekers. A mammoth dictionary lounges across a lectern, perennially open. There’s even a display case, which holds first editions and translations of my novels, standing on one side of the door; a small gold frame enclosing a mounted photocopy of my first, meager royalty check hangs on the other.

Staring into the black forest as streams of rain meandered down the glass, I sat at my desk, waiting for the Web page to load. This would be the fifth college Web site I’d checked. I was focusing my search on the history departments of schools in New Hampshire and Vermont, but as the doors closed one after another, I’d begun to wonder if that cowboy’s memory wasn’t askew. Franklin Pierce, Keene State, the University of New Hampshire, and Plymouth had given me nothing. Maybe Dave Parker was Orson bullshit.

When the home page for Woodside College had loaded, I clicked on “Departments,” then “History,” and finally “Faculty of the History Department (alphabetical listing).”

Waiting on the server, I glanced at the clock on my desk: 7:55 p.m. She’s been dead twenty-four hours. Did you just leave her in that filthy basement? With his gig in Washington, I couldn’t imagine that Orson had gone to the trouble to take our mother with him. Depositing her body outside of the house would have been time-consuming and risky. Besides, my mother was a loner, and she’d sometimes go days without contacting a soul. My God, she could lie in that basement a week before someone finds her.

The police would have to notify me. I hadn’t even given consideration to reporting her murder, because for all I knew, Orson had framed me again. Matricide. It seems unnatural even among the animals. I couldn’t begin to wonder why. I was operating on numbness again.

At the top of the Web page listing faculty was a short paragraph that bragged about the sheer brilliance and abundant qualifications of the fourteen professors who constituted the history department. I scanned that, then scrolled down the list.

Son of a bitch.

“Dr. David L. Parker,” the entry read.

Though his name was hyperlinked, his page wouldn’t load when I clicked on it. Is that you? Did I just find you because of one short exchange with a stoned Wyoming cowboy?

The doorbell startled me. I was not expecting company. Picking up my pistol from the desk (I carried it with me everywhere now), I walked through the long hallway that separated my office from the kitchen and the rest of the house. Passing through the living room, I turned right into the foyer, chambered the first round, and stopped at an opaque oval window beside the door.

The doorbell rang again.

“Who is it?” I said.

“Trick-or-treat!” Children’s voices. Lowering the gun, I shoved it into the waistband at the back of my damp jeans. Because my house stood alone on ten acres of forest, at the end of a long driveway, trick-or-treaters rarely ventured to my door. I hadn’t even bought candy for them this year.

I opened the door. A little masked boy dressed up as Zorro pointed a gun at me. His sister was an angel—a small white bathrobe, cardboard wings, and a halo of silver tinsel. A calamitous-faced man in a brown raincoat stood behind them, holding an umbrella—Walter. Why are you—

“Give me candy or I’ll shootcha,” John David said. The four-year-old’s blond hair poked out from under the black bandanna. His mask was crooked, so that he could see through only one of the eyeholes, but he maintained the disguise. “I’ll shootcha,” he warned again, and before I could speak, he pulled the trigger. As the plastic hammer clicked again and again, I cringed with the impact of each bullet. Stumbling back into the foyer, I dropped to my knees.

“Why, John David, why?” I gasped, holding my belly as I crumpled down onto the floor, careful that my Glock didn’t fall out. John David giggled.

“Look, Dad, I got him. I’m a go see if he’s dead.”

“No, J.D.,” Walter said as I resurrected. “Don’t go in the house.”

I walked back to the door, caught Walter’s eyes, and looked down at the seven-year-old angel.

“You look beautiful, Jenna,” I said. “Did you make your costume?”

“At school today I did,” she said. “You like my wand?” She held up a long pixie stick with a glittery cardboard star glued to the end.

“Take a walk with us,” Walter said. “I left the car by the mailbox.”

“Let me see if I can find some candy for—”

He rustled the trash bag in his right hand. “They’ve got plenty of candy. Come on.” I put on a pair of boots, grabbed a jacket and an umbrella from the coat closet, and locked the door behind me as I stepped outside.

The four of us walked down the sidewalk, and when we reached the driveway, Walter handed his umbrella to Jenna. “Sweetie, I want you and J.D. to walk a little ahead of us, okay?”

“Why, Daddy?”

“I have to talk to Uncle Andy.”

She took the umbrella. “You have to come with me, J.D.,” she said, bossing her brother.

“Nooooo!”

“Go with her, son. We’ll be right behind you.” Jenna rushed on ahead, and John David ran after her and ducked under the umbrella. They laughed, their small buoyant voices filling the woods. His toy gun fired three times.

Walter stepped under my umbrella, and we started up the drive, the tall loblollies on either side of us. I waited for him to speak as the rain drummed on the canopy. The night smelled of wet pine.

“Beth’s packing,” he whispered. “She’s taking the kids away.”

“Where?”

“I told her not to tell me.”

“She knows about—”

“No. She knows the children are in danger. That’s all she needs to know.”

“Stoppit!” John David yelled at his sister.

“Kids!” Walter shouted gruffly. “Behave.”

“Dad, Jenna—”

“I don’t wanna hear it, son.”

I wondered where Walter’s anger toward me had gone.

“Do you really know where he is, Andy?” he whispered.

“I’ve got a possible alias in New England. Now, I can’t be sure until I get there, but I think it’s him.”

“So you’re definitely going?”

“Yeah.”

He stopped and faced me. “You’re going there to kill him? To put him in a hole somewhere, where no one’s ever gonna find him?”

“That’s the plan.”

“And you have no compunctions about killing your own brother?”

“None.”

We started walking again. I had an awful premonition.

“You’ve called the police, haven’t you?” I said.

“What?”

“You told them about Orson.”

“No, Andy.”

“But you’re going to.”

He shook his head.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Come here, Jenna!” Walter hollered. His children turned around and ran back to us, their umbrella so low, I couldn’t see them. Walter took his umbrella from Jenna and lifted it up.

“Jenna, show Uncle Andy the tattoo you got at school.”

“Oh yeah!” she said, remembering. “Look, Andy, isn’t it cool?”

Jenna raised the sleeve of her robe and held up the delicate underside of her right forearm. My knees weakened. In pink Magic Marker, scribbled from her elbow to her tiny wrist: w—shhhh. o

I looked up at Walter. His eyes flooded.

“All right, kids.” He smiled through it. “Here. Go on ahead now. Let us talk.” Jenna took the umbrella and she and John David ran ahead as we continued on, the mailbox not far ahead.

“She had it when she came home from school,” Walter said. “Beth noticed it when they were putting on her costume. Fuckin’ teacher didn’t know anything about it. Jenna said a nice man was drawing tattoos on all the kids at their Halloween carnival. She hadn’t seen him before.”

“Jesus, Walter. I am—”

“I don’t want your apologies or your pity,” he whispered. “I’m going with you. That’s what I came to tell you. We’re gonna bury Orson together.”

The kids had reached the white Cadillac. We stopped ten feet from the end of the driveway and Walter turned to me. “So when are you leaving?” he asked.

“A day or two. I’ve gotta go before my mother’s discovered.”

His eyes softened. “Andy, I want you to know that I am s—”

“And I don’t need your pity,” I said. “It won’t help either of us do what we have to do.”

He nodded and looked over his shoulder at Jenna and John David. The umbrella cast aside, they were throwing gravel from the driveway at my mailbox, and coming nowhere close to hitting it.





21



THE eve of my departure for Vermont was our thirty-fifth birthday, and Orson mailed me a handmade card. On the front, he’d designed a collage out ure