by Rob Cornell
I listened to the breeze. The breeze actually sounded like a voice as it whispered in my ears, but I couldn’t make out any words.
I stood, jammed my hands back into my jacket pockets, and started walking toward my car. Then I stopped. I looked at the car, the streetlight reflecting off its sleek surface. It wasn’t my car. It was their car. My car was a Honda Civic, not a BMW. This wasn’t me. None of this was me.
I spun around to tell my parents to forget it, I was done trying, I didn’t belong in Hawthorne, I never had, when my cell rang. The sound startled me.
I flipped open the phone, checked the caller ID.
Autumn.
I started to close the phone, which would automatically send the call to voicemail. I wasn’t in the mood to talk to her. I’d done my job. She didn’t need me anymore.
The phone rang again.
I wondered how her argument with Doug had gone, what he might have said about me, if she had explained who I was to him. I wondered if she’d decided to confront him about the mysterious woman, even though she’d forced me to take back the pictures.
I wondered why was she calling me so late?
The phone rang a third time.
I answered.
It wasn’t any kind of word that met my ear; the breeze had sounded more voice-like. A high pitched keen came through the phone and set my teeth on edge, stood up the hair on the back of my neck.
“Autumn?”
Another strained sound came through the phone, then a choking cough. She was trying to speak, but couldn’t. It sounded like someone was strangling her. My mind flashed to a picture of Doug with his hands around her neck. I tried to get a grip before jumping to any conclusions.
“Autumn, are you hurt?”
“Blood,” she wheezed, then the phone disconnected, though I couldn’t tell if she’d hung up or if my cell’s signal had faded.
I checked my bars. I had a full set. There weren’t many things getting in the way of a signal in the middle of a cemetery. I started to dial her back, then ran for the car instead, thinking about the only word Autumn had managed to speak.
Blood.
Chapter 6
I didn’t bother knocking, threw the front door open and charged into the house. “Autumn?”
I froze in the foyer, listening.
The smallest gasps, as if from a child, echoed in an otherwise black hole of silence.
My hands shook as I rushed down the hall and into the kitchen. When I rounded the corner, I found Autumn lying on the kitchen tiles, her face mashed against the floor as if trying to cool her flushed cheeks.
A sharp, sticky smell hung in the air.
I crouched by Autumn’s curled body, rested a hand on her shoulder. Her phone lay face down a few feet away, bleating incessantly from being left off the hook. I sensed the dead presence in the living room without having to look up. Was it the smell? Or was the living room somehow cooler than the kitchen, an absence of life sucking away the heat?
I glanced up from Autumn for a second, expecting to find him on the floor. Instead, Doug lay draped on his belly over the coffee table, arms and head dangling over the edge nearest the couch. His legs, tangled together at the ankles, trailed away from the table like a pair of loose braids. A messy hole marked his back. Blood seeped out from under his chest, probably from an exit wound, and lacquered the table. A line of spittle hung from his slack jaw all the way to the floor.
Autumn shuddered under my touch. I bundled her close to me and lifted her from the floor, straining my back against her limp weight. If not for her breathing, she could have passed for dead herself.
I carried her to the front sitting room and set her in one of a pair of matching wing chairs.
She did not stir.
“Autumn.” I brushed her cold cheek. “What happened?”
She moaned, but her eyes were closed and her face cocked away from me. She might have been dreaming for all I knew.
I dug into my pocket for my cell phone.
Autumn’s eyes fluttered open. “What …”
I brushed some hair away from her forehead. “I’m calling the police. I’ll have them bring an ambulance.”
A shock of electricity could not have snapped her to her life more quickly. She shot out a hand and snatched my wrist. “No.”
The muscles in my arm tensed, not against her grip but against what I was afraid Autumn might say next.
“No?”
The way she looked past me, staring as if seeing something play across the air in front of her like a movie, sent a prickle up my spine. Until now, I’d reacted on instinct, rushing to make sure she was safe. But the tumblers finally fell into place, the combination of events unlocking the pattern and inevitable conclusions.
“What happened, Autumn?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t know, or can’t say?”
She shook her head.
“Do you know how this looks?” I asked.
Her lips peeled away from her teeth. Her voice came ragged, as if she spoke through a torn throat. “It looks like someone killed my husband.”
“What happened?”
“You think I killed him.”
“I think you better give me a damn good reason why you don’t want me to call the police.”
She squeezed my wrist, her nails gouging into my flesh.
I wrenched away from her, staggered backward. A concentrated gust of wind seemed to slam into my chest as I realized I had caused this. I had done more than break up a marriage, I had—
“Stop it,” Autumn shouted. “Stop looking at me like that. I didn’t kill him.”
Mouth dry, I said, “Tell me.”
“After you left,” she said, gasping, “we argued. He remembered who you were. I told him about you, a long time ago. I don’t know why he remembered. But I couldn’t convince him that you meant nothing, that the only reason you were over was because I wanted you to find out if he was cheating on me.”
The only reason. And the only reason she had straddled me on the couch was to bury the pain of betrayal.
She continued, “He wouldn’t leave me alone about it. He said terrible things. Then we were arguing about something else entirely. I don’t even understand how it happened.”
She took a deep breath, looked out the picture window.
My hands full with her, I hadn’t turned on a light when we entered the room. Shadows wrapped her face, but the porch light shined through the window and cut the darkness around her eyes.
In that patch of light, I tried to see any sign of a lie. I couldn’t read her.
“Keep talking,” I said.
She dipped her chin, sliding her eyes into the shadows. “I took off.”
A hint of relief got the better of me. “Took off where? Who were you with?”
“No one. Nowhere. I drove. I just drove.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know.”
“When did you leave? Was it past dark?”
She jerked her head in what I thought was a nod.
“How long have you been back?”
She grabbed two fistfuls of her hair and wrung her black locks down against each cheek as if drawing a hood over her head. “Stop it. Stop interrogating me.”
I leaned down, putting my face in hers. “Where did you go?”
She let go of her hair and covered her face with her hands. “I can’t breathe.” She tried to stand, but my body blocked her. She pounded the arms of the chair. “I parked for a while, okay? Listened to the radio.”
“Where?”
She started with the hair pulling again. This time she tugged so hard a clump ripped free from her scalp, the sound like tearing cloth.
I grabbed her wrists. “Stop it. Tell me where you were.”
She opened the fist that gripped her loose hair and let the hair drift to the floor. “Across the street”.
“From here?”
She shook her head, turned into me,
pressed her face against my chest. “From you,” she said. “From your house.”
I could picture how it would unfold. A witness places Autumn’s car in front of my house, while I was alone at the cemetery with no one to vouch for me. The medical examiner calculates time of death around the same time. Dozens of Hawthorne’s residents provide statements describing mine and Autumn’s relationship in the past.
“Listen to me,” I said, letting go of her wrists, pushing her back into the chair so I could look in her eyes. “If someone can place your car out there, it could make a bad situation look even worse. Be straight with me. What happened when you came home?”
Her eyes watched her knees instead of me. “I found him there. Right where he is.”
“When?”
“The time is all… I can’t remember. It felt like weeks ago already.”
“But it wasn’t,” I barked. I realized my hands were shaking. I massaged them together as if trying to work out a chill. “Focus. Think.”
“Maybe nine-thirty. It wasn’t yet ten. I remember looking at the clock in the car. I think. I’m not sure.”
She argues with her husband about his cheating, then she takes off alone for a couple hours, and when she gets back hubby’s coincidentally been killed during that short window of time?
I imagined trying to convince Tom with this story.
“I swear, Ridley,” Autumn said, obviously sensing my doubt, probably realizing herself how far-fetched it all sounded.
I remembered her shoving the envelope of pictures at me—take them and go away, my husband’s home. Now that he was dead, she had come back to me. Before that, she’d walked out of my life without a word of explanation, then walked back in when she needed my help fifteen years later.
“No,” I said. “I won’t do this. You need to call the police.”
She gripped my hand before I could turn away. “Please,” she said. “I need you.”
“What you need is your Dad to find you a good lawyer.”
“It won’t help,” she said. “I won’t get a fair trial.”
“Why?”
“Tom Fortier will make sure I don’t.”
My hand went limp in hers. “What’s he got against you?”
“You tell me. He’s your friend.”
“He warned me to stay away from you, wouldn’t say why. You don’t know?”
“A while after graduation I hung with a bad crowd. I think he holds it against me.”
I lifted her chin, putting her eyes back into the light. I stared hard at those dark eyes. She looked scared. Scared enough to lie. But also scared enough that the truth might be as crazy as her story sounded.
“A bad crowd,” I said. “That’s it?”
Her eyes stayed on mine. “I can’t think of anything else.”
My one hand still held her chin up, and she cupped that hand in both of hers.
“You said yourself this looks bad,” she said. “If I know Tom, he won’t even listen.”
“He might listen to me.” Even as I said it, I could still taste the bitterness left over from Tom’s warning. For whatever reason, he did not like Autumn. “What kind of crowd are we talking about?”
Autumn looked at the floor. “You know, couple girls from the south side. You remember the type from high school.”
South side kids were Hawthorne High’s bastard children, sons and daughters of Hawthorne’s small residence of working class folks—mostly maids and butlers to those on the north side. Yet because of a quirk in districting, these middle-class kids went to school with some of the richest in the city. This made for a few chips on some south side kids’ shoulders, and gave birth to a number of troublemakers.
“You get into any trouble?” I asked.
Autumn let go of my hand and squeezed out of the chair past me. She stood at the window, arms wrapped around herself. I could see her face reflected against the night.
“I’ve been a terrible bitch to you.”
I could either agree with her or keep my mouth shut. I stayed quiet.
She turned around, stared at me, mouth quivering. “Maybe I didn’t love him as much as I should have, but I didn’t want …” She pressed the heel of her palm against her forehead. Tears streamed down her face, and some eye-liner marked one cheek like a bruise.
Autumn might have cut off our relationship without explanation, might have treated me unfairly, but she had never lied to me. I could give her the benefit of the doubt, buy some time before Tom sunk his teeth into her. And I could make sure Autumn was given a fair shot.
I could do that much.
But I also knew I could do no less.
Looking at her, even in the shadows, even with her eyes all puffy and make-up smeared, even with her damn husband a corpse in the living room, I couldn’t stop the ache just under my breastbone that made me want to swim back in time and pick up where we had left off. My hands remembered how she felt, and craved that sensation again. My body recalled how it fit against hers in bed after making love, and needed that sense of belonging once more.
“Okay,” I said, and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “Let’s get out of here.”
I was going to help Autumn. Only this time I wouldn’t lie to myself. This time I knew I was helping her for all the wrong reasons.
Sheila’s house sits on about fifteen acres just outside of Hawthorne, a farm town where most the farms are now defunct, the land sold to people from the city and suburbs who decided they wanted some space and a simpler life. I doubted any of them had simpler lives, but there’s definitely something to be said for space.
As I pulled into the dirt driveway, I noticed Sheila’s porch light was still on, and could see some light through the window coming from deeper within the house. I was worried about the hour, but at least it looked like I wouldn’t have to wake her up.
I parked, left the engine running.
Autumn stared out at an oak tree illuminated by the headlights. A frayed rope from where a tire swing used to hang looked like a snapped noose.
“Wait here,” I said and turned off the headlights.
Sheila stood waiting on her porch by the time I reached the house. She wore a set of silk pajamas. Her hair was pulled back in a tight bun. I hadn’t seen her without make-up in a while. She looked older, the lines sad and deep in her face. She held a wineglass filled to the brim with red wine. It occurred to me I had never in my life seen her drink anything alcoholic.
“She just going to sit in the car?” Sheila asked.
“I need your help.”
She pulled open the screen door.
I thought we might sit in the kitchen to talk, but she led me through the house and out onto the back deck. A pair of lights flanking the door cast a yellow glow. A metal rocking chair sat before a wastebasket. Empty corn husks peeked over the basket’s edge like thin, curious fingers. To one side of the chair a brown shopping bag rattled in the night breeze, but remained weighted by its contents. A glass bowl on the other side of the chair had a few ears of shucked corn resting at the bottom. Beside this set up, on the deck floor, sat a half-empty bottle of wine.
“You shucking corn in the middle of the night?”
“Sleep doesn’t come as easily as it once did.” Sheila grabbed my elbow and pointed to the rocker. “Sit and shuck.”
“Are you serious?”
“Don’t waste my time. I’m entertaining a gentleman friend tomorrow and I have a feeling you’re going to upset me. The bags under my eyes can only stand so much make-up.”
“All this corn for you and a guy?”
“There’s another two couples coming along, but they’re merely cover. I’ll be damned if I’m going to look desperate at my age.”
I sat, dug an ear of corn from the paper bag, and tugged at one furry end, not making much progress. I swore I’d seen this done somewhere before.
Sheila set her wine glass on the deck and swiped the corn from me. “Look.” She made a quick fluid rip that didn’t se
em to have any more technique involved than mine. She slapped the corn back in my palm and sat in a matching chair, wineglass back in hand.
I started tugging with similar results to my first attempt. I finally wrenched a piece of husk off the corn, but not in a neat strip like Sheila had done. More like a chunk. I went at it again, gripping the ear so hard with my other hand I snapped it in half.
“Damn.”
I threw the whole mess into the wastebasket.
“Wasting my corn.”
“Fuck your corn,” I said and shot to my feet, paced to the edge of the deck. “Autumn’s husband was killed tonight.”
I had my back to her. I heard her gasp.
“You mean an accident of some kind?”
“Murdered,” I said and turned around. “It looks like Autumn did it.”
The lines in Sheila’s face grew deeper. She rose from her chair, sloshing wine out of her glass. “And you brought her here?”
“I said it looks like it. She claims it wasn’t her.”
“I don’t give a damn what she claims. Get her away from here. Take her home and get yourself away from her.”
“I wanted to—”
“What were you thinking? You have responsibilities.”
“You mean the High Note? This has nothing to do with that place.”
“That place,” Sheila said, voice catching, “was everything to your parents.”
“They’re dead, Sheila. My running that stupid bar isn’t going to bring them back. All it does is remind me over and over again why I left in the first place.”
Her head snapped to the side, as if I’d slapped her. In a way I had. I knew the effect those words would have before I said them.
“I have to go.”
Sheila stepped in front of the back door. “What would you have me do?”
“I need to buy some time.”
Sheila’s eyes narrowed. “I won’t lie for her.”
“She needs an alibi, just for a while.”
“You aren’t thinking straight. What could I—”
“Straight thinking doesn’t usually follow seeing someone bleeding all over the living room coffee table.”
“I’ll help you, Ridley. I’ll help you remove yourself from this mess however you want me to. I will not lie for her sake. I will not be her alibi.”