“All right, let’s go.”
She squeals and wraps her arm around me. I take in her warmth, her sweet, lily scent, and the way her hands linger for a second too long on my waist.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Sam, 2015
(Saturday Afternoon; Caesar’s American Villa, Murray, Virginia)
THE FOOD AT Caesar’s American Villa is worthy of any Roman god. First, Alicia and I have bruschetta for an appetizer. The tomatoes are so fresh and the bread has been rubbed with the most succulent garlic butter. I get fettuccine Alfredo, which is rich without being greasy, and Alicia gets Saltimbocca alla Romana, which is veal with ham and sage. She offered me some, but honestly, the thought of how veal came to be on her plate is a bit too much for me.
When we finish eating, Alicia pulls out her folder again. “So…have I tempted you into my idea by using food? I know how you love good cuisine.”
“Ah, so this was a trick?” I tease.
“Of course,” she says. “My plan was to drag you away from your office, so all escape routes are cut off, and you had no one to intervene. Then I was going to fill you up with good food to make you complacent, and now I am going to tell you wonderful things about my ideas, which you will agree to because my plan has worked.”
“Like I said before, I haven’t asked Grace, yet.”
“Most of the time, it seems like you’re trying to sell her house more than she is.”
“She’s busy,” I say, shrugging. “She has her job at Stoddard High School, she’s going to college to get a second master’s degree in counseling, and she’s…”
I’m about to tell Alicia about Grace going to therapy, but then I realize how private that information is. My mouth could get me into a lot of trouble.
“…And she’s got a lot going on in her personal life.”
“You’re working two jobs, one that you own, and both that are extremely important,” she says. Pride swells in my chest. Alicia has always known how to sweet talk to people. “You’re just as busy as she is, it’s not even your house, but you’re the one who is selling it. It’s probably best that you accept that and agree to let me help you.”
“Okay,” I say, just to appease her. “What colors do you think the rooms should be painted?”
“Not all of the rooms,” she says. “Just the major rooms—the living room, the dining room, maybe the kitchen. Either a rich red, pale yellow, or a jean-shade of blue. Of course, they would all need to be the same color for the rooms—just different shades. For decorations at the Red Silk store, they have that wooden vase, this ceramic swan that would look great on the coffee table, and this painting of red birch trees on cotton canvas would be amazing in the main bedroom.”
“Wow, you have really thought this out,” I say.
She laughs. “I love my job. It’s fun to make things look beautiful.”
“Well, you’re good at it,” I say.
She blushes. “Thank you, Sam. You’re good at being a medical examiner and a cardiologist.”
“I can’t be that good of a medical examiner,” I tell her. “I can’t even figure out who this John Doe is or even why he was killed.”
“Wasn’t the news saying he was probably killed because he could be connected to the killer?”
“But how would they be connected? Did my John Doe only have one friend, so there could only be one possible suspect?”
“Maybe only one friend in prison?” she guesses.
“It’s possible, but the detectives called the prison. They’re going through all the prisoners who have been released in the last few months, but there’s so many and we’re looking for a strand of hay in a haystack because we don’t know who the victim is.”
“Hmm.” She tilts her head. “Can you figure out more about him from his body? Like what he did for a job?”
“I’m not Sherlock Holmes.”
The waiter returns with the check.
“Thank you,” I tell him.
“I hope you and your wife enjoy the rest of your day,” he says.
“Oh, she’s not my wife,” I say. “We’re not together in an intimate way.”
He raises an eyebrow.
“I’m sorry, I thought…”
“It’s fine,” I say, placing my credit card in the check folder. I hand it back to him. “Thank you. The food was delicious.”
“I’m glad,” he says. “I’m sorry again for the misunderstanding.”
He walks away from the table. I turn to Alicia. She’s smiling.
“Wow,” I say. “I didn’t think we were doing anything that would make people think we were together.”
“You’re a man, I’m a woman,” she says. “We’re in a fancy restaurant. It’s what anyone would assume.”
“It doesn’t bother you?”
“You’re a brilliant man,” she says. “And I still love you, though it’s not the same as before. Why would it bother me to be connected to you? Does it bother you?”
“Of course not,” I say, shaking my head. “It’s just funny that he thought that.”
The waiter brings back the check, I write down his tip, and we leave. The weather outside seems more brisk than it was when we entered the restaurant. Alicia looks up at the sky.
“Are you happy with your life?” she asks.
“….yeah,” I say.
“You don’t sound so sure.”
“I think I’m going through a rough patch, but I’m still pretty happy,” I say.
“You still sound like you’re trying to convince yourself that you’re happy.”
“I guess you know me too well then,” I say.
She grins. “We did date for a few years. Though I never got to meet your parents or move in with you.”
I can’t help but laugh. “The whole thing with Grace moving in with me sort of just…happened. She wasn’t going to lose her mind over having two students attack her, but dealing with the Schneiders…that could have led to her being committed.”
“At least our time together wasn’t overdramatic, right?” she asks. “No psychos. No killers. No murders.”
“It was a simpler time,” I agree. Her mention of psychos makes me think of Deacon Cochrane. He was certainly mentally unstable, but his heart was in the right place. His murders were different from my John Doe’s murder. Deacon shot to kill—he didn’t want his victim to suffer. This killer doesn’t have any empathy.
“You know, I still think about those times that we—”
“I should look into psychiatric records,” I blurt. She glances at me.
“I’m pretty sure you need a warrant for that and no judge is going to let you search randomly through psychiatric records,” she says. “And that’s not even your job. You’re just supposed to find the cause of death.”
“I know,” I mumble. “I just wish I could do more.”
“You’re doing plenty,” she says. “When the police catch the killer, what you tell a jury about the body will make sure the murderer stays in prison for a long time.”
“I hope so. Thank you, Alicia. You’ve been so supportive of everything that’s been happening in my life. I feel like recently I haven’t had anyone to talk to, so I’m glad that we bumped into each other back in February and became friends again.”
“It’s my pleasure,” she says. She stops in front of her car. “So, should I pick up some paint?”
“Yes,” I say. She grins. “Just the paint though. I’m not sure about the other things.”
“I’ll get you to come around,” she promises. I pull out my wallet and take out a couple of twenty-dollar bills.
“Here’s for the paint,” I tell her.
She shakes her head. “I can pay for it. Pretend it’s a belated Christmas present.”
I fold the dollars in half, take her hand, and place the money in her palm. She closes her fingers around the money. She leans forward and kisses my cheek.
“I never stopped loving you,” she whispers.
Sh
e turns back around and gets into her car. She doesn’t look at me again as she drives away from the restaurant.
I touch my cheek. It feels like forever since someone has shown me that kind of intimacy—not exactly the kiss, but her words, too. My cheeks flood with heat—from embarrassment, from shame, from the tiny flicker of need to feel that level of love again.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Grace, 2015
(Late Saturday Afternoon; Kevin’s House, Murray, Virginia)
“HEY, GRACE, I’m heading back to the morgue for the night. I just want to double-check under my John Doe’s fingernails and another body came in. The hospital is pretty certain it’s a heart attack, but they want me to check it out to be sure…” Sam’s voicemail trails off for a second as if he was distracted by something. “…Anyway, I’ll make it up to you. We’ll have a date night soon…Uh, could you stay at Kevin’s again? There’s still a murderer out there and I just want you to be safe. I’ll text or call you sometime tonight, depending on when I get done, but I’m probably not going to be done until around midnight, so it’ll probably be a text. Again, I’m sorry. I love you. Bye.”
I set my phone back down, already sitting in Kevin’s driveway. This is the second time I’ve listened to Sam’s message, trying to find some hidden message in his words. He had called at twelve fifty this afternoon, five minutes after my university class begins. Did he purposely do that, so he wouldn’t have to talk to me? Or am I just being paranoid?
Or do I feel so guilty for rejecting his proposal that I believe he has been pulling away from me?
I turn my head to look at my brother’s old house. I won’t miss it when it’s sold.
Then, I see him.
Francis Tate, getting into a white truck.
Knock, knock, knock.
I jerk as a face appears in my window.
It’s Kevin.
I glance back over at my brother’s house. Nobody is there. No van, no Francis, nothing.
“Have you seen anybody over at the Schneider house?” I ask Kevin.
“You mean your house since it is legally your house?” he asks. He shakes his head. “Other than the Schneiders and their friends? No, nobody. Steve Rolf has been lingering around with his boy, but that’s it. Are you okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.
I rub my face. “I’ve just been really stressed. A lot has been going on. I think it’s all starting to get to me.”
“Well, why don’t you come in and we can try to treat that stress with some puppy love and beer,” he says. I nod, opening the truck door. I follow him into his house.
“Kevin?” I ask as I sit on his couch.
“Yeah?”
“Did you and your wife ever have any rough patches?”
“Of course we did. We weren’t perfect. I mean, I was the furthest from perfect that someone could get.”
“What kind of issues did you two have?”
He sighs, sitting across from me in his suede armchair. “Where do I begin? Finances, flirting, family…the three F’s…kids, cleaning, religion, politics, whether or not supercalifragilisticexpialidocious could be considered a real word and if it was the longest word in the dictionary. Why? Are you and Sam having problems?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. Something happened back in December and I think…I think he resents me for it.”
Rhett Butler, Kevin’s dog comes charging at me. He seems to have grown an inch or two in the last couple of days. He bounds onto my lap and licks furiously at my face.
“Hey, buddy,” I say, petting his back. “How are you doing?”
“I can’t imagine many things would make Sam resent you,” Kevin says. “You’re two peas in a pod.”
“Could you imagine him resenting me if I rejected his marriage proposal?” I ask.
Kevin winces. “That is pretty bad. Why would you reject him? I thought you two were pretty in love.”
“We are in love,” I say. “Or we were. I don’t know what his feelings toward me are anymore, but I’m still in love with him. I don’t know what’s happening to us. He just seems distant lately.”
“Well…this happened back in December and you two are still together, so he must still love you,” Kevin says.
“Or he’s just afraid of upsetting the girl who was nearly murdered twice,” I say, voicing my real fears for the first time.
“He’s not that kind of guy.”
“But he is,” I say. “He cares a lot about how the community sees him. He wouldn’t want people to think he’s a bad guy, so at the very least he would wait a few years until after the Deacon Cochrane situation to break up with me.”
“He won’t break up with you,” Kevin insists. “Look, I’ve talked to Sam about you. He is clearly, two hundred percent in love you.”
“It doesn’t feel like it.” Rhett Butler licks my chin. I scratch his head.
“Well, I’ve noticed that Dr. Sam Meadows is not the best at communication and know from my vast experiences with women that women tend to need verbal confirmations of love,” he says. “Sam has a hard time with the personal things. He just needs a little budge.”
“Do you really think so?”
“I do.”
I exhale. “I don’t want to lose him.”
“I know,” he says. “And you won’t. You two will work everything out.”
“And if we don’t?”
He glances over at his photograph of him and his wife.
“Then you move on until you find someone that you can work everything out with,” he says.
“I don’t think I can have a better relationship with anyone else,” I say.
“Then you should try to make it work,” he says, and then stands up. “How are you liking Stoddard High School?”
“It’s great,” I say. “Rick Burrows is a bit of a handful.”
“Yeah, that one is a troublemaker,” he says. “I get to see him quite often. His ass imprint is in my office chair by now.”
He stretches.
“Well, it’s late,” he says. “I gotta get some sleep.”
“Thank you, Kevin,” I say. I stand up and hug him. “You’ve been a great friend.”
He claps my back. “It’s been my pleasure, Grace.”
He pulls back and shuffles his way down to his bedroom. I take the blanket and pillow that he had placed on the coach leather club chair. I lay the pillow down on the couch, lie down, and wrap myself in the blanket. When I close my eyes, I can still see Francis. He’s invading my thoughts and I’m not sure that there’s a way to cleanse my mind of his presence.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Francis, 2015
(Sunday Morning; Connor’s House, Murray, Virginia)
THE HOUSE IS UNDER Connor Ellery’s name. There aren’t any cars in the driveway. I walk up to the garage and peek in. Nobody is home.
I let myself into the yard through the back gate. I’ve wandered around the house a few times—usually during working hours, so nobody ever notices—and it’s never been locked. I suppose with a community like this, they don’t think about locking their gates.
I’d read the news about Deacon Cochrane. From the reports, he seems a little too compassionate to me and his relationship to his grandfather a little too close. In the fall, Deacon’s journals were leaked—it was suspected that one of the Murray policemen sold the information. A national news magazine published it. It was picked up by just about every news outlet on the Internet. Deacon’s enraged grandfather, Albert Cochrane, sued everyone he could, and found a decent lawyer willing to represent him in that suit. He won enough settlement money to move out of Murray—away from the place that only saw Deacon as a monster—and he was last known to be living in Texas. Albert seems like a nice enough guy, but if I had a family member like that, I certainly would have killed them. Emotional attachments are a weakness—my attachment to Grace showed me that. Deacon thought that by killing off his grandfather’s competition that he was doing something noble and in the
end, all that happened was that he got killed.
By Grace.
For a moment, I wonder if Grace felt the same powerful feeling that I did from killing someone. I could see the two of us traveling together, killing together…an even more vicious and terrifying version of Bonnie and Clyde. But could I risk her turning against me again? Could I risk the feeling of betrayal and abandonment?
No.
I survey the property. A willow tree could be problematic—their roots have a tendency to destroy sewage pipes, water lines, house foundations, and their branches make a mess in yards. People always think that they look beautiful without understanding how insidious they are. It’s just like Grace—while you’re busy staring at the gorgeous sweeping branches, it’s already twisting around your livelihood and squeezing until everything that keeps you grounded is destroyed.
A loud knocking sound interrupts my thoughts. I flinch, the sound reminding me of my time in prison, and my eyes dart left and right searching for some prison guard that finally caught up to me.
Finally, with my heart pounding in my chest and my eyes wide with surprise, I notice Zach Schneider on the other side of the sliding glass door. Zach’s body is doubled over and his face is red from laughter. I can hear the sound of his delight even through the glass. The cereal bowl that’s in one of his hands has milk sloshing out of it from how hard he’s laughing.
He points at me. “You look like you nearly pissed yourself! I’m gonna tell everyone about this!”
He sets his bowl of cereal on the kitchen island and bolts away from the door.
Anger settles in my stomach like embers. With every breath I exhale, the embers become hotter and hotter until the flames are surging through my whole body.
Elementary, middle school, high school, college, prison…I was always the joke. Even though I made myself to look like the jocks after high school, people could still tell that I was odd and I could never fit into their world. They didn’t need to tell me that I didn’t fit in with the rest of them—I was well aware. Everyone looked at me as if I was an exhibition at the freak show.
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