Everything Burns

by Vincent Zandri

  “I’m going to administer the sedative,” announced the lab-coated woman. “You might feel a bit of a pinprick.”

  “I guess that’s better than feeling what it’s like to set myself on fire,” I said with a nervous laugh.

  She just stared back at me, then grinned. “Ready?” she said, holding down my arm with one hand and pricking the vein that stuck out of the back of my hand with the other.

  The pain shot up my arm, but just as quickly disappeared.

  Another man entered the room, a small man of late middle age, also wearing a white lab coat. “I’m your anesthesiologist,” he explained. He had a blank, clean-shaven face. “You won’t be entirely out for the procedure. But I promise you, as you enter into a seizure state, you will feel nothing. From what I’m told, you already know the drill.”

  “ ‘Fire! Fire!’ says the Town Crier,” I recited.

  “Excuse me?” said the anesthesiologist.

  “Just a favorite nursery rhyme of mine as a child,” I said. “My mother taught it to me not long before she died. Before she was burned alive in her bed.”

  So yeah, Dad, I remember. I remember it all, even if they did try to erase my memory for a while. Or maybe that’s not quite right. Maybe in the end, I just remember what I want to remember.

  Bringing the cigarette to my lips, I smoke the last of it, then toss the still-smoldering butt out the window.

  “Before she was burned alive in her bed,” I repeat aloud, the words echoing inside my brain. “Before my mother was burned alive.”

  I reach out, try to set my hand onto my dad’s knee. But all I feel is the empty seat.

  Chapter 21

  Letting myself in through the front door, I don’t take two steps inside before I freeze up. I don’t require a third step to make out the destruction. The living room is in a shambles, the couch overturned, the paintings on the wall tossed to the floor, and in one case, the canvas kicked out of its frame. Something’s been drawn on the big chalkboard wall in brilliantly colored chalk, but I don’t take the time to allow the artwork to register.

  Looking over my shoulder, I see that the dining room hasn’t fared much better. The china that Lisa stores on floor-to-ceiling shelves has been tossed to the floor and shattered, the jagged white shards covering both the tables and the hardwood flooring. But what shocks me more than the destruction of the china is that my laptop is still sitting out on the table. Whoever did this didn’t steal it.

  Gun. Go get it.

  About-facing, I head back out the open front door and sprint to the Escape. Unlocking the SUV with the electronic key ring, I open the passenger-side door, throw open the glove compartment, and I find my gun. A 9mm Smith & Wesson, like the police carry. It’s illegally owned but I don’t give a rat’s ass right now.

  I sprint back to the house, head inside shouting, “If you’re in here, motherfucker, I have a gun and I will shoot you dead!”

  Heart lodged in my throat, gun gripped in my right hand, I make my way back across the living room, across the dining room, and down into the playroom. No one there. Shooting back up the two steps into the dining room, I head into the kitchen. The entire room has been ransacked. Bowls, plates, pots, pans, and food—everything’s tossed about everywhere. I find a big French knife on the floor beside Frankie’s spilled water and food bowls.

  “Oh fuck. Frankie.”

  Bending down, I grab the knife, set it on the counter.

  “Frankie!” I shout, looking over one shoulder and then the other. “Come out, Frankie.”

  I step on through the kitchen and into the corridor, make my way toward Anna’s room. When I step inside I’m shocked to see that it hasn’t been touched. Making ready with the pistol, I inhale and yank open the closet door to my right-hand side.

  Just Anna’s clothing hanging from the rack.

  Closing the closet door, I kneel down, peer under the bed.

  All clear.

  Back on my feet, I head out into the hall and proceed to the bathroom. Other than the contents of the medicine cabinet having been tossed into the sink, it’s relatively untouched. A few steps forward and I find myself in Lisa’s home office. It too is untouched, as if the intruder didn’t think he’d find anything important in her desk or simply didn’t have the time to go through it.

  He did have the time to do one thing, however.

  A picture of me has been tacked to a bulletin board screwed into the far wall. It’s the same photo I’ve been using for my book jackets. The last couple of books, anyway. The photo was taken by Rachael inside the dining car of the train we rode together from Innsbruck to Venice through the Italian Alps a couple of years back. Nothing funny has been done to the image. No scribbled mustache on my face. No devil horns. It’s just been tacked up onto Lisa’s bulletin board, maybe to bring attention to my sudden presence in her life.

  I stuff the pistol barrel into my jeans, go to the picture, remove the tack. Holding the color image in my hand, I turn it over and see that something has been written on it. It says, “Present day Heretic. Posthumous Bestseller.”

  I set the photo onto Lisa’s untouched desk and then head back down the hall to the living room. To my right, past the overturned couch, is the chalkboard wall—the creative wall Lisa had installed so Anna could write or draw anything she wanted using the colorful chalk sticks set out in a wooden dish atop the piano. It’s not Anna’s artwork that’s presently gracing the wall, though. The drawing is accompanied by some writing. The words fly out at me in their red-chalk lettering: “Hemingway knew enough to blow his brains out after he went crazy. So should you, Heretic.”

  Below the words is a drawing.

  The facial likeness is definitely me, but whoever drew it added a Hemingway-like beard and a roll-neck sweater, just like the famous author photograph printed on the back of my high school edition of The Old Man and the Sea. My head isn’t all there. In the drawing, I’ve got the barrels of a shotgun stuffed in my mouth and the cranial cap is in the process of being blown off, spurts of blood shooting out of it like fire.

  The intruder is quite the artist.

  Turning, I once more cross over the polished-wood living room floor, back into the hall. Walking its length past Anna’s room, I enter the master bedroom. The room hasn’t been flipped. But something even more disturbing occupies the bed. Set out on the mattress is a set of clothing. A silver chain necklace with a large silver cross pendant is lying on the right-hand pillow where Lisa’s head would normally rest. Under that is a short black dress with ruffles at the bottom. A silk see-through blouse has been laid out on top of the dress. Set on top of the blouse is a black lace push-up bra. And set on the skirt are matching black satin panties. The panties are accompanied by a silk garter belt to which a pair of thigh-high stockings are clipped. Laid out over the feet of the stockings are a pair of black patent leather pumps.

  It’s the same exact outfit Lisa wore to the formal occasion she attended with David just a couple of months ago. Only he would know what she wore that night, both as clothing and underwear. Once more my heart drops into my stomach. My head spins, pulse skyrockets.

  My eyes are glued to the bed.

  I feel paralyzed. Feet buried in freshly poured concrete. Until I feel something behind me. A live presence. A man, maybe. Gripping the pistol, I pull it from my waistband. I hear something. Breathing. Footsteps. I have the pistol for protection, but it takes all the strength I can work up just to turn around. But somehow, I manage to do it.

  I turn. And that’s when I see her.

  I let loose with a short scream.

  Frankie barks.

  We’ve managed to scare the living crap out of one another. I pocket the gun, then pick her up, cradle her in my arms, tightly.

  “Jeez, Frankie, my girl,” I say, petting the top of her head and behind her freakishly long ears. “What the heck happened
here? Who did this?”

  Like I said, sometimes I imagine Frankie talking to me. I imagine what she would say in response to the direct questions I pose to her. It’s a way of destroying my loneliness. But she’s silent now. Silent and shivering in my arms. Her heart is pounding in her skin-and-bones chest. She’s panting. I should be calling the police, but my gut is telling me not to call yet. It’s telling me to hold off. Because I know full well who did this. The perp can only be one man.

  David Bourenhem.

  I saw what looked like his Honda 4x4 parked outside the medical center. He couldn’t have possibly been in two places at one time. But then, his puke-brown Honda is not the only one taking up space on the streets of Albany and Troy. Maybe the Honda I saw at the medical center belonged to someone else. Or maybe he flipped the house while I sat in the parking lot of the convenience store smoking cigs and drinking beer, feeling sorry for myself and trying to come up with reasons for leaving Lisa a second time.

  Get your shit together, Reece. Lisa needs you now.

  It’s then that I make the decision not to leave Lisa. Not unless she asks me to leave.

  Chapter 22

  I head back out to the Escape, replace the pistol in its glove compartment hiding space. I grab what’s left of the twelve-pack and carry it with me into the trashed kitchen, where I store it in the refrigerator. With the shards of broken china and glass crunching under my feet, I make my way back into the dining room, brush some of the same shards from my chair, and sit down at my laptop.

  The screen saver is changed. It used to sport a black-and-white photo of Hemingway, snapped when he was writing For Whom the Bell Tolls. The bear-like writer is seated at a wood desk, the sleeves on his shirt rolled up over bulging biceps as he pounds out the words, key by single key, to his magnificent Spanish Civil War masterpiece.

  But now the image of Hemingway is gone. It’s been replaced with words.

  THE BESTSELLER IS A HERETIC AND LIKE ALL HERETICS HE WILL BURN FOR HIS SINS.

  I recognize the line, or most of it, because I wrote it in The Damned. It’s what my character Drew Brennen says to each of his victims before he burns them alive inside a pine coffin. “You are a heretic and like all heretics, you will burn for your sins.” It’s a reference to Dante’s Inferno, Canto 10, Circle 6, in which the heretical souls of those who betray their God, their family, their friends, and supporters are forever burned alive inside a tomb that hasn’t been buried but instead, set ablaze.

  Back in Dante’s day, the worst kind of punishment was to be burned at the stake. Renaissance Florence overflowed with stories of men and women burned at the stake for betraying one thing or another, or for going against church doctrine or that of the state. Crooked politicians often met this fate, as did wayward members of the clergy. So did adulterous husbands and wives.

  So did writers.

  I don’t know what to make out of all this. Lisa has been portraying David all along like he’s fucking Gandhi, a gentle man of words and peace who bears no ambition other than to live and let live. A man who wishes no harm on anything or anyone. A man who defies the macho ethic. In literary terms, he is the anti-Hemingway, anti-Mailer, anti–tough guy anything. The gentlest of gentle souls.

  Or so claims his ex-lover. “Ex” being a dubious prefix here, folks. Yet, who the hell else could be responsible for the crimes committed in her house during the short time I was gone? Gandhi would never be caught flipping a house.

  Holding my breath, I bring up Microsoft Word. I’ve been working on and off on what will be my sixth novel, which I’m calling Blood Mountain. The novel is still there and, scrolling through it, I can see that it seems, on the surface anyway, to be uncorrupted. Like the unmolested desk in Lisa’s office, or Anna’s untouched bedroom, this doesn’t make much sense to me. Why not infect my computer if you’re not going to bother to steal it? Or better yet, why not smash it to bits like Lisa’s wedding china? Perhaps he didn’t have the time. Maybe he heard me pull up in the driveway and had no choice but to run out the back sliding glass doors, and from there into the one-hundred-acre Little’s Lake State Park. That’s exactly what I’m betting on. He’s probably still running.

  Minimizing Word, I pull up the web browser, type the name “David Bourenhem” into the search engine. His web page is the first site to come up. I swear I have to hold myself back from punching the screen when the enlarged image of his face appears. Scanning the website’s links, I click on “Contact.” What comes up is a phone number and his home-office address. As I surmised, it’s located in Troy on First Street. I know the area well.

  Rachael lives nearby, on Third Street, on the first floor of a renovated brownstone that’s more than a century old. I practically lived there myself for three years. The address listed on David’s site is 57 First Street, while Rachael’s is 38 Third Street. They live only two streets over from one another.

  Holy Christ, did I more or less live in the same neighborhood as David Bourenhem for nearly three years and have no idea? Did Lisa spend the night at his house while I was resting my head on Rachael’s pillows, just a few yards away?

  Standing, I close the laptop lid. I pull the keys to my Escape from the pocket of my bush jacket and exit Lisa’s house by way of the front door.

  Time for a face-to-face showdown with the ex-lover boy.

  Chapter 23

  I pull up as close as I can to 57 First Street and immediately spot the tan Honda parked a few yards ahead of me along the side of the road. If I’d just pulled a major B & E on a quiet suburban residence in the heart of North Albany, the last place I’d park my ride is right out on the street. That is, unless I was pulling a head fake, making it look like I’d never left that spot all day.

  Turning off the engine, I exit the Escape and immediately turn my attention to the perpendicular cross street that accesses Third Street, where Rachael lives. Maybe it’s unlikely that she would park on the cross street, but still I look for her car, a green 1990s-era Toyota hatchback. A utility vehicle that not only got her through the snow when she needed to be teaching a class at the downtown university in midwinter, but that also was large enough to cart her canvases and other more three-dimensional art projects.

  She once built a huge dollhouse of wood, inside of which she installed miniature video monitors that played old 8mm flashbacks of her childhood and the father who deserted her family. Then, in a bold statement against men who leave their wives and families behind for other women, she videotaped herself destroying the dollhouse with a chainsaw. The look on her face in the video as she tears into the dollhouse is not altogether different from the expression I must have worn as a child when I tried to light our second house on fire only a couple of years after the fire that destroyed our first house.

  The Toyota isn’t there, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t home. But this visit isn’t about Rachael. Better that I keep my mind on task, stay focused.

  I step out onto the sidewalk and head along the cracked pavement in the direction of number 57. It’s only two doors up. With each step I take, my pulse rises, the blood in my veins racing. My brain begins to buzz from the release of adrenaline. It’s a pure, primordial animal feeling, but the sound in my ears is like an orchestra stuck on a single note, playing soft at first, but then louder and louder, reaching for a heated crescendo.

  I stop when I come to the front steps of a four-story brownstone that hasn’t enjoyed the same tender loving care as Rachael’s old building. I hop the flight of stone steps up to the front door. It’s not only unlocked, it’s partially open. Set inside the narrow vestibule wall on the right-hand side are metal mailboxes for all the residents, each with a buzzer that activates an intercom. I scan the names on the mailboxes.

  Bourenhem is unit 2C.

  Making a fist, I punch the button. A buzzer sounds. I wait.

  “Hello,” says David—the word long and drawn out, like “Helll .
. . lowwww.” He sounds almost effeminate when he says it. Like maybe I’ve just interrupted him in the middle of writing a press release.

  “FedEx package for Mr. Bourenhem,” I say into the intercom.

  “Just leave it, please, Mr. FedEx Man,” he exhales.

  “Need a signature, boss.”

  He lets loose with another sigh just to make sure I know how annoyed he is at having his genius moment interrupted.

  “I’ll come down,” he says.

  “Tell you what. You sound real busy and the package is heavy. No use both of us breaking our backs. Why don’t I just bring it up to you?”

  “What a nice FedEx Man you are,” he says, his voice brighter, almost singsong.

  He hits the buzzer. The inner door unlocks electronically and opens by a few inches.

  For better or worse, I’m in.

  Chapter 24

  I bound up the stairs two at a time. The apartment directly ahead of me at the top of the stairs is B. The black metallic letter B nailed to the six-paneled wood door says so. I glance to my left and see that the apartment that faces the back alley is A. Hooking a quick right, I head for what can only be 2C, the apartment that must face First Street.

  The door begins to open just as I arrive at its threshold. My years playing high school football take over and I lower my right shoulder, barrel through the door like a 250-pound fullback crashing through the line of scrimmage. Bourenhem is on the opposite side of the door and he flies back, drops to the wood floor onto his back.

  Wide-eyed, he sees me standing over him. He screams.

  I slam the door closed, lock the deadbolt. Then, turning to him, I make my approach, slowly. He starts crabbing backward, a tiny trickle of blood now dripping from his lower lip where the wood door caught it.