Mary swung quickly around and pointed the gun at the broken window. Air came and went through her lungs in great, rapid gasps, and the tattered curtain billowed inward over the littered sofa, flapping in the stiff breeze.
A loud, annoyed Meow escaped Chester, and he jumped from his master’s arm and ran into the kitchen.
“Ches-ter,” Mary called to him, her voice quivering at its source, deep inside where staccato breaths bisected what she had said.
“Meow.”
She kept the gun toward the window (it could not be called pointing anymore, the weapon swaying and bucking in her hand as it was) and crawled three-pointed around the half-wall that separated the living room from the kitchen.
“Meow.”
The revolver jumped, its stubby barrel now sweeping the entire living room, and Mary looked back over her shoulder toward the sound of her cat. “Ches.. Chester?”
“Meow,” the tabby replied obligingly, his small face angled at something on the floor, his predator’s eyes calculating its worthiness as prey.
Mary looked back and forth between Chester and the front of her home smashed open to the night. The light from the streetlamp washed into her house only half filtered now, sharp, angular beams pulsing whole into the living room and the kitchen beyond with each flap of the mangled curtains. She caught glimpses of her cat and his attention fixed at the floor, at something round and red as best she could tell in the flat light, round and red with a crisp bolt of silver glinting out either side. She slid a bit closer and made her eyes focus on the object. Closer still, close enough to touch it if she wanted, but she didn’t. Her hand only hovered close to it.
Chester pawed at the object. It rolled toward Mary, round, red, and pierced.
An apple with a switchblade through its center.
Fourteen
The desk was neat, too neat almost for Dooley to believe it belonged to a cop. But there Joel Bauer sat, unlidding two cups of convenience store coffee.
“Just black?” Joel asked, holding the cup halfway across his desk.
Dooley nodded and took the offering, his third of the young morning. He stared vacantly into the black liquid and whiffed the aroma. “Thanks.”
“Jack Prentiss is a hothead,” Joel said. “Ignore him.”
“He’s a father,” Dooley countered. “Doing what fathers do.”
Joel wrapped both hands around his cup and tapped his fingers together. “What’s your sense so far?”
“I don’t have a sense yet. I don’t know enough about the kids.” He held one hand over the cup and let the moist steam warm it. “I was trying to get to know them. Little by little. Planting a few seeds for thought.” Dooley shook his head. “What I do know is that they don’t want to talk about something.”
“Something?” Joel sipped in slow spurts lest his lips be scalded. “What something are you referring to? Other than the obvious?”
“Guy Edmond.”
“One of them killed him. Get them to talk about that.”
“I’d like to know why they’d do it.”
“Doesn’t that come after?” Joel asked and suggested concurrently. “Especially with this victim. If you look for people who didn’t like him you’ll have half a town of suspects. Maybe the whole town.”
“Fine. Let these six tell me why they hated him.”
Joel dumped a packet of sugar in his coffee. The phone rang as he stirred with a plastic stick. “Bauer.”
Dooley let the detective have his conversation and spun a picture on the desk so he could see it. A happy Joel Bauer, and a woman, a young boy, and a baby dressed in a red and green crushed velvet dress beamed at a spot just away from the camera, a mottled grayish background draped behind. The moment oozed joy. True joy.
Did every family with children seize these instants to soothe themselves at a later date when life up and happened in some painful way? Dooley wondered if Jimmy’s parents had, and if they’d burned those as reminders of a past wished never to have been.
He and Karen had only a few wedding pictures, snapshots of giddy kids taken at a Vegas chapel by a witness he’d slipped a couple bucks to. He hadn’t looked at them in ten years.
He turned the picture back toward Joel as the call ended.
“That was the office at Windhaven.”
“And?”
“You didn’t talk to Jeff Bernstein yet?”
“If someone’s complaining, I never got near him.”
Joel shook his head. “No one’s complaining. Jeff Bernstein’s volunteering.”
“Come again?”
“He says he wants to talk to you.”
Dooley needed no more coaxing than that. He hurried out of the Bartlett Police Department building into a light flurry of snow, his coffee cooling untouched on Joel’s tidy desk.
* * *
Jeff Bernstein waited alone in the library, his lunch sack open on the table before him. An apple sat gouged to its core, and his sandwich, PB&J, moved in and out of his mouth, disappearing in fast bites. He didn’t want to be eating when the detective arrived.
That he did ten minutes into lunch, finding Jeff where the office had told him to look, sitting in almost the same seat that Bryce had occupied the day before at this time. Alone and small behind the table.
Alone and...smiling.
“Good afternoon, Detective,” Jeff said. With his good hand he motioned Dooley over and gave his mouth a last wipe with the napkin his mother always put at the bottom of the sack. “Have a seat.”
Dooley surveyed Jeff and the room almost skeptically, giving his jaw a good rub before accepting the invitation. He turned one of the little chairs across from Jeff backward and sat.
“I have some chips left,” Jeff said cheerily, offering them.
“No, thanks.” Dooley’s head cocked quizzically at the sixth grader. “Mrs. Gray said you wanted to talk to me.”
Jeff nodded, a chipper grin carved across his face. “I heard what happened with Mike’s dad last night.”
“You did.”
The happy nod again. “I guess Joey’s mom wasn’t too freaked, but Bryce’s and PJ’s folks were as mad as Mike’s dad.”
“Oh. You know this?”
Jeff smiled fully now. “Of course. We’re friends. We don’t keep secrets.”
“I see.” Dooley folded his hands on the table, and to match him Jeff lifted his casted arm up from his lap and laid it almost touching the detective. The lump of plaster thunked on the hard wood. Running from beneath the blue sling Dooley could read some of the partial best wishes of Jeff’s friends and classmates. “And your parents?”
“They say if you’ve done nothing wrong you shouldn’t be afraid of anything or anyone.”
“And you’re not afraid?”
Jeff chuckled. “Of you? No. I’m not afraid of you.”
Dooley pressed close to the table, closer to Jeff. “So talk to me. You wanted to talk, right?”
“What do you want to know?”
“I want to know what happened to Guy,” Dooley said.
“He died,” Jeff replied, cocky, even pleased.
“You don’t feel bad about that, do you?”
“No I don’t. Guy deserved whatever he got.”
There was something old in this one, Dooley sensed. A calculating pragmatism that was barely tickled by moral considerations. Barely, but maybe enough.
“He deserved to die?” Dooley probed.
“Whatever he got,” Jeff repeated.
“He never killed anybody,” Dooley pointed out. “It doesn’t seem like fair punishment.”
“He would have,” Jeff responded confidently. “Someday he would have killed someone. I’m sure of that.”
“Who would he have killed?”
Jeff shrugged, grinning obviously. “Maybe me.”
“You? Did he ever threaten you?”
Jeff lifted his cast. “He did more than threaten.”
“Did you get in a fight?”
“No,
I could outrun him. I’m fast. That’s why he did this.”
“What do you mean?”
“Guy didn’t like people getting away from him. So one day he caught me coming into the bathroom and slammed my arm down on the sink. He said I wouldn’t be able to run with a whole bunch of plaster on my arm, and to consider myself lucky because the next time I ran from him he was going to break my leg. And after that he’d kill me.” Jeff scratched at his arm above the cast. “He’s not going to do that now. Is he?”
“Did you tell?”
“Sure. He denied doing anything. He said he saw me come into the bathroom and slip by the sink. It was my word against his.”
“So nothing happened?”
“Something happened,” Jeff contradicted. “I couldn’t run away anymore. He got what he wanted. Another person to pick on.” He pulled the sling’s sturdy blue material back and pointed at one message written among the many. ‘Tough break, JB. Catch you soon.’ “Guy wrote that. He was the first person to sign my cast. He grabbed me when I got back to school two days after he broke my arm, pulled me into the same bathroom and wrote that. Funny, huh?”
Dooley eyed the slanted scrawl contemptuously.
“Oh, and JB; Guy wasn’t using my initials.” Jeff smiled artificially. “He liked to call me Jew Boy. That’s funny too, huh?”
Dooley forced his face to stone, burying any reaction as he wondered how much of this was true, concurrently believing that all of it was. “Who else did he pick on?”
“Everybody. Mike stood up for Bryce once. He got a black eye and Guy got a busted lip. They both got in trouble, but Mike was just defending himself.”
“Did he pick on Joey?”
“Sure.”
“Bryce?”
“He called him a four-eyed fag and stole his juice money at least twice a week.”
“PJ?”
“He made fun of her. Of where she lives.”
“Elena?”
Jeff hesitated, then shrugged. “Probably. He picked on most people.”
“Did you ever see him pick on Elena?”
Jeff quieted through a thought. “She was afraid of him, so he must have.”
“Why was she afraid?” Dooley pressed, digging at the reluctance.
“I don’t know.”
“I thought you guys didn’t keep secrets,” Dooley offered. “I thought you were all friends.”
“We are.”
“So?”
“So, some people have their own secrets.” The oldness in Jeff’s face inflected every muscle now, steeling the fake smile, making his eyes narrow ever so slightly.
“Right,” Dooley said, leaning even closer now. “And what’s the big secret, Jeff?”
“I don’t know what that would be,” the answer came, calm and evasive.
“You play much baseball with one busted wing? You swing much?”
Jeff smiled. “Sometimes I hand the bat to whoever’s up.”
“Do you?”
“Yep.”
“What happened back there, Jeff?”
“I told you: Guy died.”
“How did he die?”
“He got hit over the head.”
“Who hit him over the head?”
Jeff’s expression feigned a careless ignorance. “I don’t know, but when you find them will you thank them for me?”
Dooley stood and spun the chair back around, pushing it under the table.
“You don’t want to talk anymore?” Jeff asked.
“You were the one who wanted to talk,” Dooley said. “I’m done listening.”
He left the library, turning left in the main hall. His footsteps echoed sharp in the long, empty space. Outside the snow was still light, settling earthward at a gentle angle, the wind surprisingly gentle but threatening. Dooley walked through the winter feint to where he’d parked on the street.
Once inside the Blazer, he saw an envelope tucked under one wiper.
* * *
Mess cats, Caroline Hool thought to herself, looking at the pieces of crumpled paper scattered around the computer desk in their living room. Boys were most definitely mess cats.
Not that her two little girls were above the ability to make clutter where an instant before there was none. But her Bryce—whew! Give him a tablet of paper and something to write with and watch the mess be born. He’d write his stories, then type them into the computer, and as he finished entering each page he’d tear the longhand version from the tablet, ball it up, and blindly toss it toward the waste basket she’d made sure was right next to the computer desk. Right next to it! And still he missed.
And so her routine was unbroken. Every few days she’d pick up what her son had produced and discarded (his own version of the artistic process, she figured), and wriggle her hand between the desk and the wall to feel for the wads of paper that had really gotten away. And once she’d gathered the strays she would pile them on the desk, sit down in the chair, and open each compacted sheet, pressing them flat as best she could beneath her palms.
The truth be told, she didn’t mind her son’s messiness that much. In its own way, that trait allowed her to know just that much more about him. He would never let either she or her husband read any of his stories. The only time he’d had to was near the end of the last school year when one of his stories, Green Glass, was picked as a ‘Distinguished Achievement’ by a panel of teachers. Distinguished Achievement, she repeated in her head, remembering the four pages, neatly typed, mounted to a board and displayed for an entire month in the display case just inside the school’s main entrance. Four pages about a boy who finds what he thinks is a huge green diamond, but learns later on that his diamond is only a lump of shiny, melted glass. A story about broken dreams, Caroline Hool thought. About more, she had feared.
Reading it through the display case glass, she recalled the blend of pride and sadness that rolled down her throat in a warm ball. And she knew that her little boy, her Bryce, still had not let himself believe that this family was his family. Not a temporary family, the kind that was paid to feed him and see that he did his homework. A real family. A forever family.
She suspected then, as she still did, that he still felt ‘adopted’. It was going to take more time. He had come far in the four years he’d been with them, particularly the last year. And Caroline Hool knew what was behind that recent spurt of progress: the same thing that was behind his writing.
‘Children sometimes need to express things, Mrs. Hool. In their own way. Maybe just to themselves, to let them out. This could be Bryce’s way of doing that.’
That was what his teacher had told her during a parent conference near the beginning of Bryce’s fifth grade year, when she’d inquired about her son’s sudden interest in writing. The same teacher who had encouraged him to put pen to paper. The same one who had peeled back more of the thick skin with which Bryce had cocooned himself, revealing, little by little, the child he was meant to be.
And so she sat quietly, the girls napping in their bedroom, and let her eyes sample the wrinkled pages. The stories her boy wrote. Prying? Maybe. But she needed this. Until he could tell her things, until he could freely share of his feelings, this was almost all she had of his inner self. These stories were his dreams.
Sometimes his nightmares.
But not this one. The one with Commander Zaxar. Caroline Hool remembered previous pages of this story. The Sun something, she thought. Quite a long story, really. And, most wonderful of all, it was pure, uncompromising fantasy. Ardent escapism. A shining knight in outer space defending the helpless against evil. A timeless theme in a fantastic setting.
Caroline Hool grinned eagerly as she leaned close to the desk and put the pages in order, then started reading. Yes. She remembered this part. It was picking up where the last scraps had left off. On a satellite high above a threatened earth.
The drone shop, where the satellite’s robot workers came day and night to have their energy packs recharged, was dim and
dank. It reminded Commander Zaxar of the swamps of Maxa One after the twin suns had set. But in the swamps he only had to worry about the Glow Serpents. Glorified snakes! he thought. A near miss from a laser pistol would make them slither off to their submerged burrows. Yeah, the Glow Serpents were easy.
He wished there were Glow Serpents here. Not the Death Knight.
His wish was answered clearly and horrifically by a burst from a laser laser burst that passed by his right ear and punched a fat hole in a steam pipe ten yards behind him. Mist screamed from the broken ruptured pipe.
Commander Zaxar dove behind a tall mound of scrap metal. He peeked through spaces in the heap of old drone parts, but the far side of the drone shop was dark. As dark as the Grave Caverns on Thelos Antara. Dark and still.
Then, above the high shrill hiss of the escaping steem steam, Commander Zaxar heard it. That sound he would never forget. The same sound he heard the last time they met face to face. The Death Knight, somewhere in the shadows, laughing.
Laughing.
Her eyes had devoured the first page. She paused, impressed. Of course it was a child’s story, full of whimsy, superlatives, and new synonyms (it was no surprise, she thought, considering the thesaurus her son had asked for at the beginning of the school year), but it was his. It was part of him. Part of her son that she, for now, had to steal glimpses of. Someday, she prayed, maybe soon, she would know him openly.
When he was ready, she told herself, and continued on.
He was close, Commander Zaxar knew. Even if he couldn’t see him, he knew the Death Knight was close. Out there in the blackness recesses of the drone shop. Waiting for him to make his move. Waiting for him to dash for the door to the satellite’s reactor tunnel, knowing that in there was the only way for Commander Zaxar to shut down the power to the satellite’s tractor beam. The beam that was, even this split second, pulling the earth slowly out of its orbit and sending it surely toward the hot, burning sun. The Death Knight new knew this. He knew this was the only way in, and that the Commander would come. This was to be there final battle.
Fine, Commander Zaxar said to himself. If that was what the Death Knight wanted, that was what he would have.
The Commander rolled clear of the cover he’d taken sought and fired in the direction of the laughter. Laser bursts lit up the far side of the drone shop, and for a split second an instant he saw his enemy.
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