He retreated back to LA Monday morning and considered selling the Palm Springs house.
The cleaning crew had been out, and Randall gave them an extra hundred to do a deep clean. Randall contemplated draining the pool or restricting access, but he knew it was one of the house’s biggest selling points.
Another week went by and with each passing day Randall felt more confident that they’d gotten away with hiding Mickey’s death. He’d never escape his own conscience, but avoiding the police was a cold comfort at least.
The following weekend they had another guest in the pool house who arrived on Friday evening. Randall felt nervous to have anyone stay there, but life went on. For some.
The new guest was a man, arriving alone. Randall, over the phone, reminded Grayson to keep it in his pants.
“How could you even say that?” Grayson responded.
“I wish I didn’t have to.”
Randall arrived late Friday night and found Grayson and the new guest arguing in the doorway to the pool house. Grayson was obviously high.
“I just don’t know why it’s such a big deal?” the guest was saying.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Grayson whined, his voice loud and slurry.
Randall dropped his bag and edged around the pool toward the two men. Fear gripped his chest and he tried to remember the symptoms of a heart attack.
“Hey, hey. What’s going on?”
The guest turned to him. “Are you the owner?”
“Is there a problem with the room?”
“My name is Karl Donlevy and my son stayed here two weeks ago. No one has seen him since and I just want to find out what happened to my boy. This man isn’t answering any of my questions.”
Randall felt the blood rush from his head. His vision went dark at the edges, but he fought to keep it together.
“Your son?”
“My son, yes. Mickey.”
Randall did his best to compose himself, to seem natural when his guts were tangled in knots of fear. He reached for a lie, felt beads of sweat on his upper lip. He turned to Grayson. “Did a Mickey Donlevy stay here?”
Grayson began to weep. No help at all.
“Grayson, why don’t you go inside. I’ll help Mr. Donlevy.”
Karl stepped out of the doorway. “No, no, no. I want him to stay. I think he knows something.”
Grayson turned to Randall, tears in his bloodshot eyes.
“What do I say?”
Randall put a hand on his shoulder and showed all the terror on his face to Grayson to try to make him understand he needed to shut up. With a deep, composing breath he turned to Karl. “I’m so sorry. He drinks. Sometimes too much.” He’s going to fuck this up, Randall thought.
Karl drilled into Randall with eyes hard as stones. “My son was here. You were the last ones to see him. Tell me what happened. Where did he go? What did he say?”
“Look,” Randall said, then had to swallow before any more words would come out. A lie would never fit through the tight constriction of his throat. “He was here. I remember the reservation. Grayson said he stayed the two days and then left. I never even saw him. I don’t know where he went after here, or who he might have gone to see. All I know is he checked out, left us a good rating, and that was that.”
He gasped for breath as if he’d just swam ten laps in the pool. He tried for a casual smile as if this was all a misunderstanding. He studied Karl’s eyes to see if the lie had worked but he could read nothing.
The man turned away from Randall and back toward Grayson. He stepped forward and put a hand on Grayson’s arm and spun him. “You were with him. What are you not telling me?”
“Nothing!” Grayson said.
Randall tried to wedge himself between the new guest and Grayson. “Sir, please.”
Karl wouldn’t let go. “All I want is an answer.”
“I told you,” Randall said. “He drinks.”
“This isn’t just alcohol. He knows something.”
Grayson ripped his arm away. “Let me go.”
“You’ve got to tell me.”
“What do you want from me?”
Randall could see the situation getting out of control. He felt the same stomach-knotting sensation from two weeks before. He tried to move between the two men again, but Grayson was out of his mind and Karl was too consumed with grief and wanting answers.
“I want you to tell me the truth!” Karl screamed.
Grayson straightened and looked at Randall. “I have to tell him.”
A panicked No pushed against Randall’s lips, but he held it in. He pleaded with Grayson through his eyes.
“Tell me what?” Karl said.
Grayson’s bloodshot eyes turned away from Randall. He looked down, his head hanging into his chest.
“Your boy isn’t coming back.”
The two men squared off. Randall hovered nearby, feeling the static charge in the air. Karl’s skin reddened and a vein began throbbing in his temple.
Randall tried his best calming voice. “Okay, listen, if we can just—”
“What’s he saying?”
“Nothing. I told you, he’s drunk. Now if you—”
“What did you do to my boy?”
Grayson began weeping again. “It wasn’t my fault.”
Karl launched himself at Grayson, tackling him down to the pool deck. He straddled the weeping caretaker and smashed his head against the pool coping. Randall reared back from the sound of bone hitting concrete.
“What did you do to my son?” Karl spit out the words on a string of saliva that dripped from his mouth. His face flared sunburn red and the tendons on his neck were taut like guitar strings. He pounded Grayson’s head against the edge of the pool again.
Randall saw blood drip into the clear water and dissipate into a deep purple cloud. He stepped forward, then halted when he heard new sounds of anguish and rage coming from deep in Karl’s throat.
“Stop.” Randall knew his words meant nothing to the grieving father.
“He was here. What did you do?”
Again, Grayson’s skull cracked against the hard surface.
Randall stood rooted in place, unsure of what to do with the wild animal in front of him. He didn’t want to risk having Karl turn his vicious anger on him and had no idea how to stop him.
Karl stood up, huffing out breath like a bull in the ring. He spun and retreated into the pool house. Randall went to Grayson and turned him over. His forehead had a deep dent in it and his eyes were open and glazed over. Blood leaked from his mouth and from behind his left eye.
Karl came back out to the yard. Randall looked up and saw the gun in Karl’s hand.
“You tell me what happened to my son, you bastard.”
For the second time, Randall found himself on Route 74 on his way into the San Jacinto Mountains. Finding the shovel had been easier this time since it was no longer buried under other unused junk in the garage. He wasn’t so sure he could find where they’d buried Mickey, though. The gun pointing at him from Karl’s hand in the passenger seat gave him sufficient motivation to try. One thing he was definitely not sure of was whether he would return to his beloved Tennis Club neighborhood alive.
The smell of fresh blood leaking from Grayson’s skull filled the car. Randall had had the Rover detailed when he got back to LA. Now Grayson knocked around the same dark space spreading blood that would be much harder to remove.
Karl hadn’t said anything since they got in the car. His mouth hung open as he breathed, and his eyes were far away. Randall didn’t trust the gun in his hand with that lost look on his face. His son was dead, and two strangers had covered it up. Where was a father to go from there?
Randall cursed his foolish decision not to go to the police. A few weeks’ embarrassment, a few awkward interactions with the neighbors, what would it have hurt? Now he was at risk of either being turned over to the cops looking guilty of nothing less than murder or being killed by a d
istraught and angry father.
Randall could hardly even blame the man.
“It’s been … hard,” said Karl.
Randall turned and Karl kept his eyes staring into the blank distance out the windshield.
He spoke, but not really to anyone. “Mickey had issues with drugs. A suicide attempt.” He cleared his throat, the words seeming to get stuck there. “Two, actually. I always knew … I figured, anyway, that I’d find him like this. Dead somewhere. All I … all I wanted was for him not to be alone at the end. To tell him that I love him.”
Karl fell silent again, his eyes never wavering from the dark road ahead.
“I think this is it,” Randall said.
Karl looked at the bleak landscape lit by the headlights. Randall knew he was thinking how his son didn’t deserve this as a final resting place. Nobody did.
He turned the Rover off the road and found the grooves his tires had left before. Around the bend and away from view of the road, he stopped. They sat in the car for a long time, the headlights illuminating a tunnel in the darkness and at the end of the tunnel—a small mound of earth.
“This is where my boy is?” Karl said.
Randall nodded.
“Get out.”
At gunpoint Randall walked to the mound that hid Mickey’s body. He held the shovel in one hand and stared at the ground, expecting a bullet in the back at any moment.
“He’s in there?” Karl asked.
Again, Randall nodded.
“Dig.”
It didn’t take long. The shallowness of the grave was like an insult. He uncovered an arm first and Karl let out a pained wail and turned away.
“Get him out. You get him out of that fucking dirt. I’m taking him home.”
Mickey’s flesh had gone from gray to dark. The stench was overpowering, and Randall had to stop several times to retch. Karl stood back with the gun in hand and watched.
Randall opened the back to the Rover and dragged Grayson out into the dirt to make room for Mickey. He had no choice but to bear-hug the corpse and lift it into the back.
The smell would never be out of his nose. The feeling would never leave his skin. The guilt had a physical sensation, a rank stench of death. He would never leave this moment, even if he somehow managed to live beyond the next few minutes.
“Am I supposed to put him in there?” Randall asked Karl, looking down at Grayson’s body as he gestured toward the shallow grave.
“You do what you want.”
Karl had wandered to the back of the Rover and stood looking at his son. Randall had placed him awkwardly in the back, a tangle of limbs and dirt-crusted skin.
Randall dragged Grayson by the ankles to the hole and pushed him in. He took up the shovel and threw a clump of dirt over the body. He glanced over his shoulder to where Karl stood in darkness, entranced by the sight of his boy coiled lifeless in the back of the car.
Taking the shovel in hand, Randall crept away from the hole. A light wind around them filled the air with a low static hum. Now and then a bird called out. They were close enough to the road that when a car did happen by, which wasn’t often, they would hear it as a rush of air rising and falling in pitch.
As he grew closer, a look of resolve crossed Karl’s stoic face. He was looking at the inevitable. A moment he had expected, though maybe not in this way. His son, lost to him. It would have happened one way or the other.
Randall saw his worst decision laid out before him. He’d further tortured a man who had suffered already with a son struggling with addiction. And Randall had thought only of himself when he’d chosen to hide the boy’s death from the world.
It hadn’t made the problem go away. It still led Karl to his door. But after Karl, who else would there be? The one man looking for Mickey was here. The one link to the houseguest.
Randall gripped the shovel. He could still make it all go away.
He’d already done the worst, hadn’t he? He’d made his choice for self-preservation.
He lifted the shovel and swung.
He crossed back over Belardo and into his neighborhood. He stood under a stinging-hot shower for a half hour. He rinsed the shovel off with a hose and stored it in the back of the garage behind several boxes of old books.
Randall poured himself a bourbon, no ice. His skin itched with the touch of three dead bodies. His head filled with the smell of fresh blood and two-week-old rotting flesh. His ears replayed the crack of bone as the shovel blade connected with Karl’s skull.
A single cricket needled his song into Randall’s brain.
It would be with him forever, the guilt. The memory. Stench, sound, touch of cold flesh.
He woke to the sound of the phone. The sun was up, but he didn’t know if it was morning light or afternoon sun. He answered. An inquiry: was the pool house available?
“No,” Randall said, his voice weathered and foreign-sounding to himself. “I’m no longer accepting guests.”
A COLD GIRL
BY KELLY SHIRE
Cathedral City
At seventeen, Jessie knew a few things. Like if you knew a guy and pictured a sweaty scene of the two of you tangled in the dark, chances were good that he’d already beat you to it. He probably imagined his own version, and in X-rated detail, back when you were stalled out on how good his forearms looked in his white dress shirt with the rolled-up sleeves. Nick, for example: though he was her cousin Mia’s boyfriend, she caught him looking at her since she arrived two weeks ago. And she thought about him, plenty. It was hard not to, with them all living under the same roof in Mia’s tiny apartment. She tried not to stare when he came out of the shower after work, a towel wrapped around his waist to walk from the bathroom to the bedroom he shared with Mia.
So, she didn’t feel guilty lying in her sofa bed at night and conjuring up scenarios with Nick, scenes of kissing and rubbing against each other, her hands braced on his golden arms. In her visions, the room was always dark except for a row of white candles in the background, and she was dressed in something filmy and flowing, something that made her look like Stevie Nicks as she wafted into the room. And it was always late, very late at night.
Compared to Palm Springs, the town that was its immediate neighbor to the west, Cathedral City was a poor relation, an awkward middle child, the last kid picked for the team. This was also how Jessie had always felt whenever she stood beside, or thought about, her older cousin, Mia. Mia and her family lived in Cathedral City, but to Jessie, her cousin had always seemed like Palm Springs: more popular, prettier, and desirable.
Jessie wasn’t exactly poor, but she’d grown up in a small bungalow up in Santa Clara. Though her parents’ house in the pricey Bay Area was worth more money, Jessie didn’t understand that. All she knew was that Mia’s parents, her aunt and uncle, owned a sprawling Spanish-style house in the south end of Cathedral City, up in the hills in a neighborhood called the Cove. Jessie had grown up having to swim in her town’s public community pool; Mia had grown up with her own shimmery turquoise pool (with a hot tub!) right outside her patio door.
Jessie was staying with her cousin for six summer weeks in Mia’s cramped apartment in Cat City (as she called it). The first time she’d walked in the front door, Jessie had been shocked at the size and overall run-down state of the place. Mia’s dingy apartment sat a few blocks north of Dinah Shore Drive, one of those long desert streets named for celebrities nobody younger than a hundred could remember. It had only one bedroom, and thin kitchen cabinets painted white that felt sticky to the touch. The floor tiles were white too, but looked gray, and a lot of them were chipped or cracked.
For the first time in her life, Jessie felt like she might be richer, and maybe even smarter, than her beautiful cousin.
Jessie’s mom, Rose, a divorcée immersed in the first stages of a new affair, had arranged the trip to get her out of the house. Jessie lobbied hard against it, but in the end, Rose had prevailed. “Between the pool and all those tourist spots, you won�
��t even have time to miss your friends,” she swore.
Jessie wondered now exactly what tourist spots her mom was talking about. Everything her mom had ticked off on her fingers was actually located in Palm Springs: the huge water park, the tram that ferried visitors up to the top of the San Jacinto Mountain, even the cool vintage Camelot theater that showed indies and midnight movies. Cathedral City had a franchise miniature golf and arcade park, and a fancy movie theater, but what town didn’t have that stuff? There was literally nothing to do every scorching summer day. Mia’s apartment complex did have a pool, but it was an unshaded, basic rectangle that was usually crowded in the late afternoons with rowdy Mexican kids—real Mexicans, not a watered-down half-Latino mix like herself and Mia.
Both only children, they were the closest things either had to a sibling, though separated by five years and raised in different halves of the state. With her glossy dark hair and striking light eyes against her olive skin, Mia had been popular with boys from the sixth grade onward. Jessie couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t compared every aspect of her looks against her cousin’s—a hopeless game, since they looked nothing alike. Jessie had white skin that resisted tans, brown eyes, and a cloudy mop of hair. She was curvier than Mia, though. Her chest formed a buoyant shelf beneath the T-shirts she’d learned to wear a size too small, and the rounded curve of her hips filled out her jeans in a way that made men on the street lift their eyebrows and turn to watch her pass.
What Rose hadn’t counted on in her plans for Jessie’s summer was Nick. Walking into baggage claim at the Palm Springs airport toward waiting families, Jessie spotted her cousin, standing beside a lean guy with a trim beard and shaggy dark hair. She ducked behind a businessman and swiped on a fresh coat of lip gloss. Mia hugged her, then introduced Nick as her live-in boyfriend.
Jessie thrust out her hand to Nick. “Hey, I’m Jessica. Nice to meet you.”
“Nick Vitale,” he said. Jessie watched the ropy muscles in his arm flex as he gripped her hand. “Mia’s told me a lot about you. Nice shirt,” he added.
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