A Long December

by Richard Chizmar

  For the first time in a couple of weeks, I don’t feel afraid.

  Things only got worse after that day in the barn with Momma.

  Within six months, Walter’s store went bankrupt and he was forced to hire on with Jefferson’s Trucking. The new job kept Walter on the road two weeks out of every month—I was grateful for this, and I know Momma was too, although she never said a word about it to me.

  Between the store closing up and all the nasty stories floating around town—some folks were saying that Walter lost a lot more money gambling on card games than he ever did at the store—well, after all that business, people pretty much stopped coming around the house to visit. They even stayed away during the time when Walter was out on the road.

  As young as I was, even I could understand the reason for this, and so could Momma—people just didn’t know what to say anymore. Some folks were embarrassed and others were just plain frustrated. They had tried to help in the past, but Momma had turned them all away with nothing more than a polite thank you. Now things were at their worse, and Momma and me were on our own.

  Every night I prayed for things to get better.

  But I guess no one was listening.

  Week before Christmas that year, Momma ended up in Arkansas County General with a couple of broken ribs. She spent four days in a hospital bed, and Walter spent thirty days in the county jail.

  It was in the hospital that Momma first told me about her dream. I think it was the pain medicine that did most of the talking for her, because when she told me about it, she sounded so crazy and upset—so unlike my Momma—that I was frightened to gooseflesh just listening to her.

  For the past couple months, Momma explained, she’d been having the same dream each and every night…

  She’s being held prisoner, locked away in the highest tower of a crumbling, ancient castle. The tower is made of rough blocks of stone and is so enormous that when she looks out the window all she can see are dark storm clouds and endless night sky. It’s never daylight in her dream; always nighttime and always in the midst of a horribly violent storm, with rumbles of thunder marching closer and closer and jagged flashes of lightning stabbing the sky. As the storm grows more and more powerful, the stone tower begins to sway dangerously in its grip, enough to make her dizzy, and no matter how hard she tries she can never see the ground below. It’s almost as if there is nothing out there to escape to, nothing left in the world to hope for.

  But that wasn’t the worst of it, Momma explained.

  In the beginning of the dream, she is dressed in her wedding gown and high heel shoes, everything clean and pretty and white, her long blonde hair flowing down behind her back, braided so nice and perfectly…but when she finally turns away from the window and glimpses herself in the fancy gold mirror hanging on the opposite stone wall, there is nothing left of her but a bag of bones—a parched skeleton—grinning an awful grin and smelling of wet, graveyard dirt, and her hair is limp clumps of rotting string, her dress nothing but tatters of faded yellow cloth…

  Listening to her tell me about the dream that day in the hospital made me realize something very important: it was the first—and only—time I had ever seen my Momma afraid.

  We drive into Los Angeles early the next morning. I pass maybe twenty hotels before finding one I like the looks of. I tell the kids to stay in the car and I go inside to pay for the room. I hand the woman behind the counter cash in advance for a week and give her a false name. The fat man sitting next to her never looks up from his crossword puzzle.

  Once inside the room, the kids immediately turn on the television and flop onto the bed. I lock the door and turn on the air-conditioner and peel off my clothes to take a shower.

  Despite the weather, I run the water steaming hot and take my time.

  It’s the best shower of my life.

  On the twelfth day of September that long ago year, two days short of my sixteenth birthday, Momma took Walter’s deer rifle down from the rack on the den wall, loaded it at the kitchen table, walked back into the den, and shot Walter three times in the head while he was sleeping on the sofa.

  She had discovered that Walter was raping me.

  I’d never said a word to her, but she found out anyway.

  Later that morning, when the sheriff’s boys came by, they found Momma sitting on the front porch, rocking in her favorite chair, reading from the Bible. She held the front door open for the officers and told them exactly what had happened.

  Walter was dead, of course. His brains splattered all over the wooden paneling and the antique cuckoo clock I used to love so much when I was a little baby. Still, the judge wasted little time in deciding that Momma was in no kind of shape to stand trial. “Prison is not the place for her,” Judge Henderson stated for the record. “It seems that she has already served her sentence…for most of her adult life.”

  So, instead, they sent Momma to some mental clinic in Texas, and she lived there in medicated peace until the day she died…only three-and-a-half years later from a heart attack.

  Soon after the shooting, my Aunt Charlotte, Momma’s youngest sister, came down from Thornton and took me home with her on the train. Uncle Pete made me a bedroom in the basement of their house, and I lived there for the next five years…until I met Charlie.

  Our hotel room is on the third floor. It has a tiny balcony—room enough for two adults to sit without much comfort—and a view of the main highway and the strip mall across the way.

  After my shower, I put on clean clothes and sit outside with wet hair and smoke a cigarette; my first in a long couple of years. Charlie always hated it when I smoked.

  I inhale one cigarette all the way down to the filter and light a second one right away. I notice the blood on my hand then. Dark smudges crusted in the swirls of my palm and around the knuckles. I stare at the blood, hypnotized by the sight of it. I thought I’d washed it all away, but I guess blood has a way of sticking to things.

  History has a way of repeating itself, Blue.

  Sitting there on the balcony, listening to the traffic pass, I can almost hear the whisper of my Grandpa speaking those words to me. It was one of his favorite sayings, and something I didn’t much understand as a child. He was a dear old man—the gentlest and wisest I’ve ever known—and I miss him terribly right now.

  I look at my watch. Run the numbers through my head.

  Just over twenty-four hours ago, I killed my husband in the garage of our home. He was working on another one of his projects. Something for the garden, he told me earlier at the breakfast table.

  I stood there in the doorway to the garage and watched him for maybe a minute. And then I did it. Carpenter hammer to the back of his head. Hit him maybe ten, twelve times until he stopped moving. Rolled him underneath the mini-van and left him there. Packed the suitcases, picked up the kids after soccer practice, cleaned out the checking account, and drove away into the desert.

  I met Charlie at a spring church picnic, and I knew I loved him by the end of our second date, two weeks later. I was twenty-one years old and had never been in love before—it was wonderful.

  Soon enough we were inseparable, and to no one’s great surprise, we married later that autumn.

  I moved out of Aunt Charlotte and Uncle Pete’s basement and we moved into a two-room apartment over by the lake. That winter, Charlie got promoted at the printing plant and I started working at the library. We spent most evenings taking long walks around the lake and talking ourselves to sleep. On our two month anniversary, we cut down our first Christmas tree together and, a week later, celebrated the holiday as happy as two people can be.

  He was everything I ever dreamed a man could be: handsome, charming, hard-working, faithful.

  We didn’t have much in the way of material things back then, but we didn’t care. We were in love. We were happy.

  And we remained that way for close to ten years…through two miscarriages; the birth of the twins; a cancer scare (him) and a couple of ot
her close calls (me); him getting relocated to Arizona last year and us having to pick up and move.

  Ten long years, we were happy.

  But then something went wrong…

  I stare at the blood on my right hand for a long time and think of my husband.

  It’s noisy outside on the balcony—with all the morning traffic passing by on the highway—and my thoughts are spinning wildly inside my head. But I do know one thing for certain: I did the right thing.

  Charlie was changing…becoming a stranger right before my eyes. First, there was his job. Just last month, he’d mysteriously started working more and more late evenings at the office. And then, even more bizarre, he went in the last couple of Saturday mornings. He tried to explain all this by saying that the extra hours went along with his latest promotion, that he had additional responsibilities now. But I knew better.

  Then there was the drinking. Where before Charlie had never touched the stuff, now he liked “a beer after dinner once in awhile.” Those were his exact words. He insisted that he enjoyed it only a couple times a week, but he didn’t fool me; I knew exactly what was going on.

  And, finally, there was sweet little Jenny. My baby butterfly. Charlie had started spending more and more time with her lately. Reading to her at bedtime. Playing ball with her in the backyard. Helping her with her math homework. Focusing his attention solely on her and ignoring Brad almost completely.

  But as soon as I brought up the subject, he looked at me with one of his worried expressions, came over and hugged me, and said that maybe it was time for us to call the doctor and have him check my medication again. God, I hated him when he got like that; so damn coddling and condescending. Then, just the other morning after breakfast, after the kids had gone to school, he’d made a big deal of saying that he was concerned about me, that I wasn’t acting like my old self.

  But he wasn’t fooling me. No, siree, he wasn’t.

  He was the one who wasn’t acting like his old self.

  He was the one who was changing.

  And then the other night it happened…

  Momma’s dream.

  It came to me for the first time a week ago—and every night since. I couldn’t believe it. After all those years, I had completely forgotten about it.

  But there was no doubt in my mind. It was Momma’s dream alright. Everything was the same. The tower, the storm, the skeleton…only this time it was me being held captive in that tower, me wearing that awful wedding dress.

  And right away I knew what was happening: Momma had sent the dream to me as a sign—a warning.

  Charlie was changing.

  And, just like Momma, I knew what I had to do to protect my family.

  I sit outside on the balcony and smoke the entire pack of cigarettes—twenty of them right down to the filter.

  And then I get up and go inside to the family I love so much.

  A CRIME OF PASSION

  1

  Past midnight. A dark cabin nestled in the wilderness. Night sounds…invaded by the whisper of heavy tires. Doors slamming. The crunch of gravel under footsteps.

  Many footsteps.

  Instantly awake, Drake lifted the .38 from the nightstand and slipped out from beneath the bedsheet. He crouched to a knee, listening, staring out the open curtains at the front yard below. He glimpsed a flicker of sparks in the darkness, then the orange tint of flames, and thought: My God, they’re going to burn down the cabin.

  2

  Thomas Drake sold his first novel, Nightlife, on his thirtieth birthday. He celebrated both events with a carry-out pizza and a solo trip to the movies. The book—an urban crime thriller—sold well in hardcover and the paperback edition snuck onto the N.Y. Times list for three weeks. The resulting four-book contract allowed him to quit his job as a social worker and write full-time.

  Despite the lucrative deal, Drake continued to live a comfortable, rather conservative life in the suburbs outside Baltimore. He was a bachelor by choice, rarely dated, and had never dated the same woman twice. Whose fault that was, he claimed he didn’t know.

  Drake did admit—and too often, his few friends scolded—that except for his bank account, he didn’t offer a very attractive or exciting package. He was barely of average height, and at least ten pounds underweight. Receding hairline. Pale skin. A face of little character.

  And he was far from daring or spontaneous, writing in an upstairs office six days a week, eight hours a day, preferring mornings and early afternoons, walking his two-year-old Labrador retriever several times a day, playing poker on odd Monday nights (more out of habit than actual enjoyment) and golf twice a week. And, no matter what the day had been like or what the next had to offer, he always read himself to sleep.

  3

  Drake scrambled closer to the second-floor window, his heart pounding at his bare chest. Their van was parked at the bottom of the cabin’s gravel driveway, parking lights still on. Cocky bastards. Surprised they didn’t just toot the damn horn to announce their arrival. A small fire burned to the side of the van, a safe distance from the cabin. The flames threw distorted shadows across the lawn, and Drake watched as the figures took form. He counted all four of them, and found a hint of relief in knowing that no one was lurking beyond his view. They didn’t appear to carry weapons, but Drake knew the firepower was there.

  For just a moment, he contemplated opening fire on them from the window, but ruled against it. Despite an extensive book knowledge of weapons, he’d never actually fired a gun until a week ago. And a week’s practice hadn’t helped much; six bottles out of ten remained his best score. He knew his only chance was at close range.

  The woman remained by the fire—it was now waist high and growing—while the others returned to the van. The back doors stood open and Drake could see several stacks of boxes inside. The men waited in turn, then carried armloads of what he immediately recognized as books—his own novel, The Prey, he knew—and took turns dropping them onto the fire. With a flush of surprise and anger, he realized that they were replaying the book burnings from New York and Chicago and the other cities they’d followed him to.

  None of them made a move toward the cabin, content for the moment with the destruction of his books. He could hear them mumbling through the slightly open window. Nothing loud or clear enough to understand, but he guessed that they were congratulating themselves for finding him again, for destroying more of his evil work. Crazy fuckers. Probably thought he was cowering in fear. Let them think it, Drake thought. It’ll make my job that much easier.

  He remained at the window and watched, recognizing each of their faces in the glow of the fire. The woman named Jessie. Strikingly beautiful and clearly insane. She was their leader. And the three men. All large and equally crazy.

  Six days. It had taken almost a week, but they’d somehow tracked him across hundreds of miles. Drake had known they’d eventually find him—in fact, he’d spent most of the six days at the cabin trying to prepare for this moment—but he couldn’t help but wonder how they’d done it. He’d told no one where he was going. No one, because, quite simply, there’d been no one left. Drake shifted his weight and flexed the fingers holding the pistol. Let ’em come, he thought.

  Outside, the fire spat gray smoke, and Drake imagined he could feel its warmth wash his face. He touched a finger to his cheek. It was hot, but only from anticipation…and yes, he admitted, from fear. As the three men returned to the van for another load, Drake pushed the curtains aside and thought, That damn Times critic was right: I never should’ve sold it to the movies…”

  4

  Despite his usual insecurities, the follow-up novels did well and continued Drake’s success. His main character, Robert Steele, was an aggressive New York City attorney (by day); a street-smart vigilante with a penchant for breaking the law and serving his own brand of justice (by night). A rather trite theme, Drake admitted, but he’d added what proved to be an irresistible quality to his character. He had made the lawyer a hopel
ess romantic; a puppy-eyed tough guy with a heart of gold and a body to match. Steele chased criminals while gorgeous women chased him. Steele’s audience grew into a wide and loyal one, and it showed in Drake’s royalty statements.

  By his fourth novel, Drake was a major force in the crime and mystery fields. A regular on the bestseller lists. Guest-of-honor at conventions. Major awards winner. Book club selections. Frequent appearances in the media: television, radio, newspapers.

  Foreign sales from his first four novels had even allowed him to buy a lakeside cabin in the hills of Western Maryland. A place to escape the creeping closeness of suburbia, a place to really be alone and write. No neighbors. No telephone. No mail. Just a two-story cabin with spacious rooms, a double fireplace, and an office with a view of the lake.

  Then…came trouble.

  The Prey, Drake’s fifth and most daring novel, drew more attention than all of his previous books combined. Part of the reason was that, for the first time, a Thomas Drake novel had debuted in the top five on both the Times and the Publishers Weekly best-seller lists. The other, more publicized reason, however, was the novel’s controversial theme.

  The Prey was darker—and more ambitious—than the typical Steele novel. Less romance and more gritty drama. The book followed Steele as he infiltrated the seedy New York underworld of child prostitution and pornography to search for the killer of his lover’s teenaged sister. The world Drake described was ugly and dark and violent; his characters breathed hate and perversion. The writing itself was grim and graphically violent, and the ending was not a happy one.

  Drake, his agent, and his editor all agreed that it was a risk, moving away from the popular Steele formula, but when the book debuted so high on the bestseller lists and stayed there, and when the critics lauded it as “chilling and thought-provoking” and “disturbingly real,” their concern changed to delight.