Only he must accidentally have said it aloud, because Claire’s response surrounded him like an armed posse: ‘What did you just say to me?’
‘Not you, sorry, not you.’ Reuben had never heard her sound so pissed. ‘Hang on a sec.’
He pulled to the shoulder and braked, decelerating over the rumble bars, his tailbone vibrating in unison with the rearview mirror. He piloted the Challenger to a short, skidding halt through the grit scattered along the edge of the pavement.
Shit shit shit.
He took a shaky breath and started over. ‘Claire, listen to me. You’re totally right. I haven’t been telling you the truth, and I can’t even imagine what you must be thinking. But I promise there’s no possible way you’re anywhere close to being right.’
‘That’s supposed to reassure me?’
‘There is an explanation. I swear.’
‘Great, I’m still listening. For about the next ten seconds.’
An eighteen-wheeler roared past, buffeting him with its slipstream, rocking the Challenger on its springs. He didn’t know what to say.
‘Somebody here needs me. That’s the only way I know how to put it.’
‘Ha!’ Claire said. ‘What’s her name?’
‘Ben.’
‘I see. Even better.’
‘It’s not like that,’ Reuben insisted. ‘At all.’
‘Then what’s it like? By all means, fill me in.’
‘I …’ Reuben paused as another big rig pummeled him with wind and noise. ‘I just don’t know how to explain this over the phone, honey. But the second I get home we’ll sit down, just the two of us, and I’ll tell you every single thing. OK?’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Absolutely. Every last detail.’
‘In that case,’ she said, ‘I won’t be here when you arrive.’
‘Claire, no, please,’ Reuben said. He could feel his heart racing. ‘Just wai—’
‘Feed your own stupid bird,’ she said.
The Bluetooth system beeped at him, and Claire’s voice disappeared. The loneliest, emptiest, most abandoned-sounding dial tone in the world filled the car.
Reuben put his head back against the seat and closed his eyes. After a moment, he reached out and killed the tone.
Five seconds later, the phone rang again. Reuben sat up like a man electrocuted, jamming this thumb painfully while jabbing at the call button. ‘Claire, thank god. OK. Just give me one chance to—’
‘Ruby, I’m so sorry!’ a completely different voice said. ‘I had no idea. I just blabbed without thinking.’
Reuben sighed heavily, sagged back into the seat, and closed his eyes again. ‘Hundred percent not your fault, sis. Don’t worry about it.’
Long silence.
Then, tentatively, his kid sister Sara said, ‘Are you telling me this means there really is a monster?’
Once upon a time, Martin Middleton – Ben’s father – had earned his living as an electrical engineer for a mid-sized architectural firm. On his fortieth birthday, he’d cashed his 401(k) and taken an unexcused absence from his family, striking out to ‘follow his bliss’ via unencumbered travel and nonspecific adventure. Marty Middleton’s parting gift to his young son, then eight years old, had been a do-it-yourself ham radio kit and a three-line note: If you can build this, you’ll always be able to reach me. I’ll see you again. Dad.
Both these claims had turned out to be spectacularly untrue, of course, as bliss-following Martin had managed to kill himself three weeks later while hang-gliding somewhere in New Zealand. He hadn’t been a bad guy at heart, Ben’s mother always said – just the last in a long line of scoundrels, screw-ups, and general shmuckos that had comprised the male of the Middleton species for generations. But that was before you came along, she’d told Ben. Even as a kid he’d been skeptical of that. But he’d gone ahead and built that radio anyway.
Meanwhile, Susan Middleton had carried on doing what she’d been doing before single motherhood had landed upon her newly widowed shoulders: being a well-liked high school music teacher. She performed part-time as a cellist with the Omaha Symphony Orchestra and gave private lessons on the side, teaching out of the house for extra cash on her spare evenings and weekends. It had been entirely from his mother that Ben had inherited his love of music, if precious little native talent for producing it himself.
Years after his parents’ separate but equally untimely deaths, Ben had combined his maternally bred passion with his paternally forfeited trade skills – along with some unexpected woodworking Zen he’d first discovered in high school shop class – to gradually teach himself the finer points of luthiery and signal routing, eventually launching a dream of his own. He’d called it MiddleTone Labs: a boutique custom shop specializing in solid-body electric guitars, hand-wired effects pedals, and vintage-style tube amplifiers, all of Ben’s personal design.
The company had looked like an energizing success that somehow matured into a towering failure, ultimately crashing to pieces like a middle-aged electrical engineer in a cut-rate hang-glider. It never occurred to Ben to question where he’d inherited his business sense.
He’d moved what little remained of MiddleTone headquarters out to the sturdy old barn that still stood on this acreage, even though it had been decades since a Middleton had farmed the surrounding land. There he made the most of his fake sick day, trying his best to limit his thoughts strictly to the work at hand.
Ben finally came in around mid-afternoon, after he’d grown too hungry and distracted to carry on without slicing off fingers – or worse, screwing up the neck pocket on Charley’s guitar. He made himself a sandwich and sat down with Reuben Wasserman’s scrapbook again.
It began with a family tree, pasted right inside the cover on old-looking onionskin paper. Perched at the top: Ben’s great, great, great, great grandfather, a genuine Wild West marauder named William Wolcott. Here, at least, was something Ben could say for his father: Marty Middleton may have been a self-absorbed fool. But at least he hadn’t been a slobbering, kill-crazy maniac.
He’d come from one, though.
It was an old gallows joke in the Middleton family that the men had all been sired by an outlaw. Privately, Ben often had wondered if this tired old claim were actually true, or just an offhanded way of writing off decades of idiotic behavior. But according to history books, the man himself had been real enough. In his day, William – who had gone by the storybook-sounding handle ‘Bloody Bill’ – had murdered women and children and burned at least one small prairie town to the ground. And here again was the name. In hand-scripted ink. Heading up the genealogy chart Reuben Wasserman and his family had painstakingly compiled, tracing its ever-thinning branches all the way down to Ben himself. If the Middletons had been a monarchy, it occurred to him now, it would be just about time to sell off the throne.
As for the rest of the material collected within, Ben’s own personal papers weren’t as comprehensive. Included in these pages was every piece of public information about his first twenty-five-odd years a diligent person would be able to find, all of it dug up and slipped under plastic by complete strangers. His birth notice. His wedding announcement. Even his high school sports stats. He found a string of local newspaper articles about the highway crash that had taken his mom six months before Charley had been born – stories so painful that Ben had declined saving any of them for himself.
Curiously, things more or less dried up there. Ben couldn’t help thinking that if anyone were to use this scrapbook, as it stood, as the definitive guide to Benjamin Allen Middleton, they’d be forced to imagine a promising, young(ish) man with his prime years still ahead of him. So it was good for a few laughs, at least.
But Ben still didn’t know what to do about any of it.
He didn’t know how or why this crazy Wasserman clan had developed their breathtaking obsession with the Middletons. He didn’t know how the woman he still loved could possibly consider – even after all he’d put her throug
h – moving their teenage son to the other side of the country.
He didn’t know why he hadn’t already reported Wasserman to the police. He didn’t know what he was going to do for work after the end of the quarter. He didn’t believe for a single, solitary moment that a 150-year-old mud monster was coming to kill him …
… and he didn’t know what was making the faint noise he heard coming from somewhere inside the house.
FIVE
Answer: his lost cell phone.
It had fallen down between the sofa cushions. Ben fished the phone out with his fingertips, looked at the caller ID, sighed, and put the phone to his ear. ‘Hey, Jeeter.’
‘Hi Ben,’ Ajeet Mallipudi answered, sounding chipper as usual. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘I’m fine,’ Ben said. ‘Just a stomach thing, no big deal. Thanks for checking up on me.’
‘Oh sure, sure,’ Ajeet said. ‘We missed you at work. Are you sure you’re OK?’
‘Feeling better already.’
‘That’s great. Cool.’
Ben sensed that there was more coming, so he waited.
After a pause, Ajeet said: ‘So we can still have paintball at your place tomorrow?’
SIX
Enough is enough, Reuben Wasserman thought. He told himself that Eli would have understood. It probably wasn’t true, but honestly … did it really matter?
Eli was gone. And, look, Middleton wasn’t going to listen to him until it was too late, anyway. He could have stayed home and sent an email for all the progress he’d made. Meanwhile, his own life was falling apart at the seams.
It was time to go home.
So he checked himself out of the Settle Inn, set the cruise control five miles an hour above the posted speed limit, and aimed the Challenger back toward Chicago, where he belonged. Every so often, maybe once per hour, he replayed Claire’s latest message over the car’s sound system. It must have come in while he’d been staring down his own reflection in the bathroom mirror back at the motel.
I lost my temper. I’m sorry. Her voice sounded damp and vaguely swollen, as if she’d been crying. It killed Reuben to know that it was all his fault she sounded this way. And here she was, the one apologizing. If you come home right now, I promise I’ll listen. I’ll come back to your apartment after work and wait for you there. But only today. So … please come home. A long pause. This is Claire.
Something about that parting attribution overfilled Reuben’s heart with affection and remorse. Of course it was Claire. Who else? Sweet, unpresumptuous Claire. He didn’t deserve her.
And so he drove, stopping only for fuel and coffee, clocking time and distance in his head all the way. He lost an hour to road construction around the Quad Cities, finally nosing his way across the Mississippi River much later than planned. He opened up the Challenger’s big hemi V8 after that, gobbling up gas and gambling with the state patrol as he tracked imaginary lines across the collar of Illinois with his Michelins. He hit late traffic coming into Joliet, by which time his joints had grown stiff, his bladder full. Reuben pressed on, mile by creeping mile, ignoring his mounting discomfort as he plowed through the ’burbs, into the heart of the South Side.
It was just after eight o’clock by the time he finally pulled into his parking spot behind the three-flat apartment building where he lived, on a leafy Hyde Park side street, not far from campus. Reuben could smell cooking food as he lugged his suitcase up the creaky wooden staircase to his door. Burning food, more accurately, but what did that matter? It was heaven to be home.
And Claire was here, just like she’d promised. She was attempting to prepare them a meal. Reuben Wasserman was damn well going to make all of this up to her, just like he’d promised.
‘It’s me,’ he called on his way through the door. ‘Claire?’
‘I’m right here,’ she said.
Sultry voice. Lights low in the apartment. Two very promising signs.
She was sitting with a glass of red wine at the dinette table off the kitchen. And she was wearing his favorite of her work outfits, too: the charcoal pencil skirt, the white blouse with the high collar, the black kitten heels. As an added bonus, she was wearing these things in his very favorite configuration of all: blouse untucked, top button open, heels kicked aside. Hair down. He thought of it as her ‘in for the evening’ look.
Reuben dumped his bags by the door and tossed his keys in the dish and went straight to her. He ignored the pain in his straining bladder. He didn’t even bother to close the door behind him.
‘God, honey, I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘You look fantastic. It smells great in here. Thank you. Thank you for giving me this chance.’
She didn’t rise to meet him, but that was OK. Reuben fully expected he’d have to work for this. Fair was fair.
But as he approached her, the track lighting in the apartment came up, as if on cue. The effect was confusing. Like he’d walked into a set on a theater stage.
In the climbing illumination, Reuben noticed several things at once, in no particular order. Each detail seemed to overlap the others in a series of snapshots, a disorienting collage:
Claire’s eyes were deeply bloodshot. Her face looked slick, glistening with nasal discharge and tears.
The wine was a prop. She was handcuffed to the arms of the chair.
The note he’d heard in her voice was not seduction. It was terror.
Van Damme’s cage was empty.
‘Ah. You made it. Wonderful,’ a strange voice behind him said. ‘We’ve been waiting for hours. It’s almost time to eat.’
Reuben spun around as a man stepped out from behind the open apartment door. The man was very tall and very slender. He wore a dark, ill-fitting suit and black leather gloves. The man had perhaps the most alarming face Reuben had personally ever seen on another human being.
‘My name is Malcom,’ this man said, smiling a smile that made Reuben’s testicles want to crawl up into his body and not come out again. ‘Malcom Frost. How do you do?’
‘I …’ Reuben started. But that was all he could come up with.
Malcom Frost stood perhaps six and a half feet tall. If his suit had been soaking wet, he might have weighed 160 pounds. His face and scalp were a webbed mass of scar tissue topped by patchy wisps of white-blond hair. He looked like a man who had survived a house fire. Or possibly a napalm strike.
‘Reuben, I presume?’ Frost smiled again. His dishwater-gray teeth looked underdeveloped. Almost like baby teeth. ‘Reuben Wasserman, the water carrier?’
‘I …’
‘Why don’t you sit down?’ Frost suggested. ‘Take a moment to collect yourself.’
Reuben heard a sound and looked at Claire. She was crying again, working hard to control her sobs. She worked as a loan officer at the Fifth Third branch on East 53rd. Reuben had always been amused by that confluence of street address and business name. They seemed meant to be together. Just like he and Claire seemed meant to be together.
What was happening? What was happening? Why was this happening?
‘I said sit down!’ barked the man who called himself Malcom Frost. Then, almost as quickly as he’d erupted, he softened again, tilting his head kindly. ‘Oh dear. My apologies.’
Claire lost her battle with the sobs, then. Reuben looked down, pulsing with a hot blend of relief and shame. He didn’t want to see, didn’t want it to be true. But the lights were up now. There was no denying reality.
Reuben Wasserman, the water carrier, had pissed himself.
They sat together in a triangle at the dinette table: Reuben in his reeking, sodden Levi’s, Claire in her handcuffs, and Malcom Frost.
Two other men in dark suits had emerged from the bedroom hallway to place table settings for all three of them. These men – thick faces, thick necks, general thickness – now busied themselves in the kitchen. Both wore impenetrable black sunglasses, as if they’d seen too many movies. Not movies about kitchen help, per se.
‘What I can’t quite
bring myself to imagine,’ Frost was saying, ‘is how you managed to mobilize before we did. Will you tell me your secret?’
‘Google Alerts,’ Reuben said. ‘Now can you take those cuffs off her?’
‘I can. And I’d like to. I don’t enjoy making people suffer.’ Frost smiled again with those unnerving little Chiclet teeth of his. ‘I suppose that’s perhaps not entirely true, but I do like this Claire of yours. Believe it or not, Mr Wasserman, I have no personal issue with you, either. You two seem like a cute couple. When one of you isn’t running off telling the other one lies, that is.’
‘Please,’ Claire said, regaining her composure. ‘Just tell us what you—’
Frost crooked a single thin finger, cutting her off as if flipping a switch. ‘Hush, now. Reuben knows why I’m here.’
‘But I don’t!’ Reuben said. ‘Who are you?’
‘Let’s not retread the introductions. But I understand you’ve been taken off-guard.’ Frost chuckled, shaking his head. ‘Google Alerts. Can that really be true?’
‘Look, I set one with the keywords “Steamboat Arcadia” when I was about fifteen years old, OK?’ Reuben said. ‘It started popping off about six months ago.’
‘Extraordinary.’
‘What do you want?’
‘Simply put, I need your help.’
‘My help? With what?’
‘Collecting a package. It’s going to require more travel on your part, I’m afraid.’
‘But I don’t know anything about any of this.’
‘Now, that’s not strictly true, and we both know it.’
‘I never even believed those stupid stories!’
‘Never?’
Claire said, ‘What stories?’
‘Maybe when I was a kid,’ Reuben said. ‘When I was a kid I believed in Santa Claus, too.’
‘Had you been here in Chicago when we arrived,’ Frost said, ‘carrying on about your usual Friday class schedule as I understand it, I’d be inclined to believe that. Imagine my surprise to discover that the water carriers really have kept tradition alive all these years. And in this day and age!’
Kill Monster Page 6