by SM Reine
Against the far wall of the attic were piled many boxes. The boxes in front contained the Christmas ornaments, and the ones in the back contained all kinds of shit, ranging from school yearbooks to trophies, old clothes and wedding gifts we had never even bothered opening. The kind of boxes that stayed taped shut until you either moved or died. Well, it was here in an unmarked box that I had kept the letters from Amanda. The box was within a box, under a stack of my old college research papers. A beautiful hiding place, I had once believed.
A quick overview of the attic told me that everything seemed in order as I had last seen it, which would have been the last time I’d sat up there and read those letters, drinking scotch and pretending not to cry.
We walked over to the stack of boxes, skirting an old exercise bike and two big stand-up fans. A fine film of dust swirled around our ankles as we passed. The floor creaked with just about every step. Real spooky. I had goose pimples.
From the dust, I’d have guessed Gerda had never been up there, since she was a bigger neat freak than me. Nevertheless, I pulled out boxes and handed them to Tabby, who then stacked them off to the side, until I came across a medium-sized white box. This, too, was unmarked. I pulled the fifteen-pound box out and walked underneath the light, sitting the box on top of an ugly coffee table I’d inherited from my first college dorm.
“What are all these bottles doing up here?” Tabby asked, waving to the collection beside the table. The empties were dust free, and if the remains were pooled together, they might amount to a nice Long Island iced tea without the ice.
“Looks like the kind of place where somebody might sit and remember,” I said.
“The past is dead,” Tabby said.
“Not around the Mead family,” I said. “It can just get up and walk the hell over—”
“Petey first,” she reminded me. “Then you can have your breakdown.”
I took a deep breath. So far, if Gerda had come across the letters, she sure as hell left no evidence of it. For some reason, I had expected at least something up here to be out of place, to have given her away. And, maybe she had secrets of her own. Maybe some of those boxes held old spell books, experiments, the bones and skins of reptiles.
I opened the box, pulling out the cardboard flaps that were tucked within each other. Everything was very neat, just as I had left it when I had last mooned over the letters. There were two stacks of papers, in two neat columns. I had placed on top of each stack a couple of college papers in which I had received a perfect hundred in college. The papers were still sitting there. The stacks had the appearance of old college papers. A perfect hiding place.
Lifting the thick piles of paper out of the box and setting them on the ground at my feet, I uncovered the small box sitting in the corner of the bigger box. There was still a clear piece of tape holding the top flap down. Everything seemed to be in order.
I lifted out the box and flicked the tape open with a slice from my fingernail. Tabby loomed over me, breathing heavily in my ear, her breath warm and stimulating. Her chin touched my shoulder as she watched me open the box.
The letters were there, but they were torn into pieces, every last one of them.
And there was one rumpled piece of lined notebook paper, with two words penned by Gerda’s frantic hand: Curse you.
Son-of-a-bitch.
20
My heart wanted to break. All those precious loving words twisted and torn into pieces. Someday, I swore, I would tape up every last one.
Tabby let out a low whistle. “Maybe you didn’t know your wife as well as you thought you did.”
“Maybe nobody knows anybody,” I replied, thinking about how Amanda had hidden both the pregnancy and the family’s long lineage of witches. And how Gerda must have kept a key. I wonder how many times she’d slipped in while I was away. Maybe she’d stood over me while I was snoring away in bed, testing the edge of her knife, contemplating.
“Okay, so now we can definitely give her ‘psycho’ points,” Tabby said. “But we already know that your wife knew about Amanda, remember? She was the one who called my sister to tell her that you were married.”
“Sure,” I said. “But I was able to hide the extent of our relationship. For Gerda’s sake—and perhaps so I wouldn’t wake up on the wrong side of a knife blade—I made it seem like an inconsequential affair. Just a few dates. Nothing serious.”
“Until she found these letters and saw that it was more serious than that. That you, in fact, loved Amanda.”
“And you think that would drive her over the edge?”
Tabby thought hard about it, and as she thought, I saw that her eyes were moist. It isn’t easy talking about your murdered sister, especially when it hasn’t even been 24 hours. Even for a hardened cop.
“I suspect,” she said, and paused. She tried again. “I suspect it was a series of events, Al. And each flamed a deeper and deeper rage. When do you think she found these letters?”
“No idea, but they were untouched maybe two months ago. She must have kept a key.”
“So it’s a fresh discovery, but she obviously suspected more.”
“Like you said, a series of events. You think she’s the killer?” I asked.
“Put it this way, Al: I have no fucking doubt. The next step is to figure out where she is.”
“The detectives told me they’d searched her apartment and have it staked out. But she’s too smart to waltz into a trap.”
Tabby said, “Sounds like she’s smarter than anyone thought. Fooled the shrinks into believing she was okay, fooled the police into thinking she wasn’t a threat, and fooled herself into believing that serial killing wasn’t a genetic disorder.”
“Can I ask you something?”
She shrugged. I went for it.
“Back when Tattoo Boy was harassing us, you reached in your jacket and came out with a badge. Are you by any chance carrying?”
She gave me a rueful grin that said she was ready for anything, and I shuddered a little. If the Mead family indeed practiced “An eye for an eye,” I might cause the cold-blooded killing of yet another person. But I couldn’t deny my own lust for revenge, which now seemed as powerful as the lust I’d once felt for Amanda.
“What now?” I asked, afraid to ask but doing it anyway.
“I need to think.”
“Well, I don’t think we can do much in the middle of the night,” I said, yawning. “My brain’s fried.”
I put the letters back in the shoebox, closed the unmarked white box, and proceeded to re-stack, with the aid of Tabby, the rest of the scattered boxes.
Eyes burning, brow dewy with beads of sweat, we stepped down into the upstairs’ hallway. I lifted and then snapped shut the attic stairs, causing pain to shoot through my spine. I stood for a few moments with my left knuckle digging into the middle of my lower back. The pain seemed to be suggesting that I had possibly lifted the stairs a little too carelessly.
“Okay,” Tabby said, glancing at her watch. “Two hours until dawn. We may as well catch a few winks before planning our next move. Maybe one of us will dream up the answer.”
I glanced at the bedrooms. No way in hell was I sleeping alone in this place, and the Mead house was far enough away that I’d probably snooze and crash the bike on the way over.
But there was also no way I was going to ask Amanda’s lovely sister to come to bed with me, barely twenty-two hours after Amanda had been murdered. Even though my intentions were decidedly pure—I was scared as shit of possessed mice.
“Umm, how about we sleep in the living room?” I said. “You can have the couch, and I’ll take the Barcalounger.”
“I can see why Amanda fell for your charm,” Tabby said.
“Sarcasm isn’t cute at four in the morning,” I said.
“I don’t do cute,” she said. “And don’t make any jokes about me needing my beauty sleep.”
“Maybe you need some garlic and silver bullets and voodoo dolls.”
; “It’s okay. You locked the door, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, but the mice are already inside, remember?”
“It’s not mice I’m worried about.”
“Easy for you to say. Your best friend didn’t die from a mouse bite and you didn’t get cursed with your deepest fear.”
“Mice are one thing. A zombie Max Richter is another.”
For some reason, I’d clung to the illusion of safety because of the distance we’d put between us and the old folks’ home. Maybe it was because the Surgeon of Silicon Valley had been on foot, and I couldn’t wrap my head around the dead goon driving a car. But what use was logic like that? Logic no longer had a reliable place in my world.
“I’ll get some pillows and blankets,” I said, opening the hall closet rather than risking one of the bedrooms. Besides, I was embarrassed by the marital bed I’d once shared with a woman who was turning out to be a cruel, vindictive bitch.
I pulled out some spares and dragged them downstairs to the living room, Tabby following. I tossed the bed gear on the couch and said, “Be right back.”
“Where are you going? To get a snack?” She sounded hopeful.
“Sure.” Except the thing gnawing at me was something else—thankfully not a mouse—and despite my physical exhaustion, I might lay there thinking too much. Such was my addiction that I was willing to risk mice to go into the kitchen and open the cabinet.
Real alcoholics don’t have liquor cabinets. They can never keep enough of the stuff in stock and tend to drink it faster than they can carry it into the house. I didn’t know if I was an alcoholic, but I did keep a bottle on hand at all times. For emergencies, of course.
And this seemed like an emergency.
I didn’t want to wake up with a hangover, though, so I only took three good swallows. Well, maybe four.
Okay, five.
Then I was back in the living room with some Cheez-Its. “All clear,” I said.
She snacked on a handful or two while bundled up on the couch. Still dressed except for my shoes, I tucked myself in as best I could while sitting with the chair leaned back, tightening the blankets so there were no cracks, except a little hole for breathing.
The lamp was on, and if you could fall asleep with one eye open, I did.
The booze definitely helped.
21
Tabby was already up and composed, the blankets neatly folded on the couch, when I jerked awake.
She was holding a recent photograph of Gerda, after my ex-wife’s makeover, when she’d said she was trying to create a new “her” on the advice of her therapist. The red hair and clotting mascara, along with a few collagen injections in her lips, had combined with a flamboyant wardrobe to mask the old Gerda. The change had been startling at first, though you could still see the old serial-killer ghosts lurking in her eyes if you knew her. And I did.
And, I’m almost ashamed to admit now, after the shock wore off I’d enjoyed sleeping with the new Gerda, fantasizing she was a stranger. We’d even played a few games with it, but in light of recent revelations, I suppose they hadn’t been games to her. They had been dress rehearsal.
“Who is this?” Tabby said.
“My wife,” I said, groggy and feeling like a polecat had slept on my tongue.
“This doesn’t look like the woman in the Richter case files.”
“She...well, people change.”
“I know this woman, and it isn’t Gerda. Why are you lying to me?”
That brought me the rest of the way awake. “Why would I lie about something like that?”
“You lie like you breathe. You lie you like drink. Just because.”
I unwrapped my blankets so I could defend myself. “I know my own wife, Officer Mead.”
“This is Louise Sanderson. Amanda’s friend.”
“Friend?”
“Yeah, they met at Lamaze class. Louise is a volunteer there.”
“I swear—”
“Don’t tell me you were boning yet another woman while all this was going on. Does she have a box of love letters in the attic, too?”
“Do I look like that kind of guy? I mean, look at her eyes.” Self-righteous indignation never works well with drunks or weasels, but I gave it my best.
Tabby peered more closely at the photo and gave up her rage with reluctance. “Hmm.”
“What’s this ‘Louise Sanderson’?”
“She chummed it up with Amanda, almost like she was sharing the excitement of the pregnancy. Said she couldn’t have kids of her own so volunteering was her way of playing mother. And, of course, she couldn’t help but notice that Amanda was in class without a partner on the days I couldn’t come because of work.”
“My God. The bitch is even more conniving that I thought.”
“Yeah. Like I said, she’s smarter than she looks. I’m going to have to upgrade her from ‘psychopath’ to ‘sociopath.’ She’s up in the big leagues, with Bundy, Ed Gein, and Jeffrey Dahmer.”
“And Max Richter,” I added. “Jesus, what if she took Petey for some sort of cannibalism thing?”
“That’s why we need to act fast. But there’s one more thing. Louise had met Nana, too. We all met for coffee a couple of times, and I know Louise—I mean, Gerda—seemed especially drawn to Nana, as if they knew each other from way back.”
“Maybe they went to the same craft workshops. You know, ‘How to Extract Owl Pellets,’ ‘Broomsticks on a Budget,’ that sort of thing.”
Tabby didn’t appreciate my weak attempt at humor. “Don’t disrespect the craft, Al. I would think you’d appreciate it by now.”
“Yeah.” I glanced around. The new revelation had stunned me so much that I’d forgotten all about the mice. I noticed a weak gleam of dawn in the crack of the curtains. “So what do we do now?”
“We should go to the police.”
I didn’t want to point out that she was the police. “And tell them what? That your grandmother put a curse on my ex-wife, so that means she obviously was the killer? And we have all these dead mice as evidence? And, by the way, there are aliens in the White House?”
“No, we have more. Louise—or Gerda—came around a lot, became a family friend. Not realizing Gerda was your sick ex-wife, Amanda trusted her, told her everything, even about you and how she became pregnant.”
“But Amanda never told me.”
“Why would she? I tried too many times to have her get back into contact with you, said you had a right to know, but she absolutely refused. That’s how deeply she felt your betrayal.”
My gut ached. Some whiskey in my Wheaties would have helped about then, but it looked like the breakfast of champions would have to wait. I had to eat a little more crow first.
“The Mead family sure does know how to carry a grudge,” I said, tugging on my boots.
“Anyway, Gerda used a different name around us, Al. That has to mean something to the police, and maybe give them some new leads.”
“But why would she befriend you and your sister?”
“Maybe to get the full story. Maybe to plan her revenge to the T. Maybe she really did want to be close to that baby of yours that she could never conceive. Who knows? But we’re not doing such a bang-up job of rescuing Petey on our own, are we?”
“She could be long gone. She’s probably left the country by now. After all, there’s no APB out on ‘Louise Sanderson.’ It’s not hard to get fake ID’s in California. Hell, her dad had a dozen aliases. If he hadn’t been into killing, he could have made a fortune drawing multiple unemployment benefits.”
A soft purring momentarily caused my heart to stop dead, only to start again with pounding energy. A horde of murmuring mice?
Tabitha had been equally startled, but then she gave me a sheepish grin. She reached into her jacket, which apparently hid all the gizmos even if it couldn’t fully hide her figure, and pulled free her cell phone. She flipped it open and said hello, sounding very much like an old man. She hadn’t gotten much sleep, either.
She listened for about ten seconds, nodded once, and said, “Can you get Ramirez? I’m not exactly up to it.” She waited a beat, then added. “Yes, of course I know I’m the sister and it makes a great photo op. Well, the mayor can go to hell. Goodbye.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked, after she hung up.
“They want me to come in,” she said. “Looks like the mayor is making this the crime of the century and the symbol of all that is wrong with society, and wants to use me to proselytize in front of the cameras.”
“And convince the public why he should get re-elected so he can boost police funding.”
“That’s the drill. Unfortunately, they’re looking for Gerda when they should be looking for Louise.”
“You didn’t tell them,” I pointed out.
“Because we’re not doing it that way. If this is blowing up and the media types are watching, I picture an ugly standoff, a lot of backstory on the Surgeon, and, if my nephew is lucky to make it out of this alive—which I seriously doubt given the level of cop-jock hormones raging at the moment—then he’ll never have a normal life. He’ll always be the ‘Serial Killer Baby’ and get his own YouTube channel.”
Every time she mentioned the baby, a baseball bat of guilt and awe whacked me in the stomach. The thought of Gerda’s reptilian smile as she held my baby boy sobered me up better than black coffee and any twelve-step program. “We’re back to Square One, then.”
“No.” Tabby flipped open the phone. “Square Two.”
22
“Hey, this is Officer Tabitha Mead with Fullerton PD,” she said into the phone, using her most professional tone. “I have to serve a court summons on a Louise Sanderson and she apparently moved recently. I know that’s a common name but maybe if you searched your database of recent property transfers, she might turn up.”
Tabby smiled as if she were there in person, carrying out her con with charm. This woman had a lot of guile, but I was beginning to realize it was an attribute of her gender, since I’d never met a woman who was merely all that she seemed and nothing more.