by Mark McNease
He decided to keep his promise to Danny and leave Imogene’s emails until the morning, when he could respond to them calmly, reassuring her that the earth had not shifted beneath her feet the past twenty-four hours. He was just about to turn off his phone when he saw the alert for a text message. Odd, he thought, looking at the time stamp. It had come in at 10:00 p.m. but they’d been on the road then. He hadn’t heard any alert, and he never had his phone on vibrate. The text was from Teddy Pembroke, Pride Lodge’s jack-of-all-trades. Teddy had been with the Lodge for fifteen years and was the only person other than Sid and Dylan who lived on the property.
The text read: “Let me know when u arrive. Things have gone wrong. Acceptance.”
“Hmm,” Kyle said, staring at the message, then looking at the nightstand: 11:30 p.m.
“What?” asked Danny, zipping up his now-empty suitcase and sliding it under the bed.
“Teddy texted me.” He showed Danny the message. “Is it too late to call?”
“Yes,” Danny said, glancing at the clock. “And what’s with the ‘acceptance’?”
“It’s a quote, from the book they use in Alcoholics Anonymous. Kind of a mantra for him. I should call.”
“It can wait. Let’s just enjoy one quiet night away from everything and everyone.”
Kyle smiled at Danny, trying to hide his unease about the text message. He’d befriended Teddy on their first visit to the Lodge and had kept in touch with him through the occasional email and a phone call now and then. Teddy had called him two days earlier to make sure they were still coming.
“It’s Halloween,” Kyle told him. “We never miss Halloween.”
“Good,” Teddy had said. He sounded nervous on the call, edgy. “I won’t be staying at the Lodge much longer, Kyle. Something’s going on here, something bad, we need to talk.”
“What, Teddy? Just tell me.”
“Not on the phone. I’m not even sure if I’m imagining some of this, it’s confusing, but somebody needs to know. You’re good at helping me sort things out, Kyle, it can wait two days.”
Kyle had become Teddy’s reluctant confidant, especially the last year. Teddy was close to Kyle’s age but had never done much more than handyman work and odd jobs. Clearly once handsome, with chocolate brown eyes that were as seductive as they were sad, a mouth that had a habit of biting its upper lip, and still thin when most men his age were packing on weight, Teddy seemed as if he were from the coulda-been-a-contender school. Had he gotten more education, had he applied himself more intently, and especially had he not been an alcoholic. That was where Kyle had helped him most, connecting him with a local man Kyle knew was in Alcoholics Anonymous. Kyle wasn’t in AA and had never had a drinking problem, but he was very good at finding sources and researching—it’s part of what he does for a living—and after a few failed starts, Teddy had finally gotten sober six months ago. Maybe, Kyle thought, that’s what this was about. Maybe Teddy had concluded he could no longer work at the Lodge and needed to move on for the sake of his sobriety. He had already stopped helping Cowboy Dave and Happy Corcoran in the bar. That’s when it occurred to him this might be about love.
“Is there something wrong with you and Happy?” Kyle asked. He knew Teddy and the much younger Happy, who had started as a bar back the summer before, had been dating. Young man breaks old man’s heart, Kyle thought to himself, old man folds up his tent and runs away.
There was a moment of silence on the other end. Then Teddy said, his voice lowered as if someone might hear him, “Happy’s gone. Since yesterday, without a word. I’m afraid it’s my fault.”
“He’s a kid,” Kyle said, immediately regretting it. Happy was twenty-five or thereabouts and capable of making adult decisions. “A broken heart at that age . . . “
“That’s not what I mean,” Teddy said. “I told him things I shouldn’t have told him, things that put him in danger. I should have known better, he’s a talker. He can keep anything but a secret, and now he’s gone.”
“What secret, Teddy?” Kyle said, his exasperation showing. “What did you tell him?”
“Not on the phone.” And then, with a sadness Kyle could feel from 70 miles away, “He wouldn’t just leave me.”
The call ended then, with Teddy not wanting to say anymore until they spoke in person. Whatever the problem was, it had Teddy itchy, sounding paranoid, and the sudden disappearance of Happy could only make it worse.
“You’re sure it’s too late?” Kyle asked, looking at the clock again.
“Let them man sleep,” Danny said. “You’ll see him at breakfast.”
Kyle decided Danny was right. Teddy worked very long hours. He didn’t need Kyle waking him up over a text message.
Kyle turned his phone off, waiting to make sure it actually shut down (it had a strange habit of coming back to life, as if it didn’t appreciate being told what to do). He set it on the nightstand, then stood up and started to unbutton his shirt.
“I can do that,” Danny said, motioning Kyle onto the bed. “I haven’t forgotten how.”
Kyle let it all go then, enjoying the touch of the man he was already growing old with.
Chapter 3
Room 202
She liked the idea of being a lesbian assassin and wondered if there were others like her, how they would go about finding one other, if they did. Maybe there was some sort of Facebook page for her kind, some site that required coded phrases and passwords to enter, but once inside she would not be alone in her singular mission, her only drive. It had been very lonely, and while she allowed her imagination its moments, she knew she did not belong in the company of killers. She’d had no choice in the matter, and was not really an assassin. Assassins were sent by others, were they not? They did the bidding of paymasters, while the assassin herself might have no stake in the matter at all. It was just a job, a high-risk paycheck. There was no comparison to be made. Hers was a mission of justice, of setting right a world that had been tilted wickedly out of balance thirty years ago when she was just a ten year old child hiding in a closet.
She had heard the men break into their home in Los Feliz, an affluent section of Los Angeles with its own boulevard snaking along past the Greek Theatre, east toward Glendale. She and her parents were supposed to be on a flight to London, part vacation, part present for her tenth birthday, but she had fallen seriously ill with a flu (there it was again, the guilt; it had been her fault somehow, another reason she must make amends and end these lives) and they had postponed the trip. Had they gone, had she not complained or registered a fever, her parents would be alive and her life would have had a completely different trajectory than the one leading her here, to this strange lodge outside a town she’d never been to or planned to see again.
Her childhood bedroom was on the second floor down the hall from her parents’ room. She hadn’t been able to sleep, tossing and turning, sweating with her fever, and when she heard the glass shatter she thought at first she had imagined or dreamt it. That’s what fevers do to you. She sat up in bed and listened, hearing what to her was the distinct sound of someone in the house. She hurried out of bed in her nightgown and tip-toed quickly down the hall. Her father had always been a heavy sleeper, and her mother had the habit of using ear plugs to soften the sound of her husband’s snores. Emily—that was her name then—went to her father and shook him awake.
“Daddy! Daddy!” she said, rocking him furiously. “There’s somebody downstairs!”
Carl Lapinsky pulled himself from a deep sleep as quickly as he could, like a man swimming furiously up toward the surface. The alarm in his daughter’s voice told him there was no time to waste, and he put his fingers to his lips to tell her to be silent. He’d heard her perfectly well, even blanketed by sleep, and he leaned up on one elbow to listen to the silence outside the room.
There it was, the sound of hushed voices. Carl cursed himself for not turning on the alarm. He’d seen a news report just the other day about the folly of having an alarm
system you didn’t turn on when you were home. Men especially thought they didn’t need an alarm to protect a house they were in. Now, in the darkness with the sound of intruders coming up the stairs, Carl knew he would never make that mistake again.
His wife Barbara had woken up, disturbed by the commotion in her bed, and was taking out her earplugs when Carl told his daughter to get into the closet and stay there. She did as her father told her, rushing to the closet and hunching down below her mother’s dresses, leaving the door open just a crack.
It was Carl Lapinsky’s second mistake, and a fatal one. He owned a gun, but kept it in the closet, where he had just sent his daughter to hide. He cursed himself for not thinking clearly, and wondered if he had time to rush to the closet and get the gun he kept in a box on the shelf. He would try, he had to. He made a gesture of fingers-to-lips, shhhh, to his wife, and swung his legs off the bed, about to dash to the closet when a man stepped into the doorway.
“What the fuck?” the man said. Clearly he had been surprised to find them there.
Carl turned and saw him: a squat man, thick with a barrel chest, but an intelligent face that registered, in that instant, curiosity as much as menace. Even in the darkness Carl could make out the man’s appearance. He was wearing a blue or green flannel shirt, gray windbreaker, blue jeans, white sneakers and a belt with a ridiculously large silver buckle on it. One of those country-western type buckles you’d expect to find at a roadside honky-tonk holding up some fake cowboy’s pants. It did not belong with the sneakers and windbreaker, and Carl was wondering why anyone would wear a belt buckle like that without boots when the man slid a gun from his jacket pocket and shot Carl in the head. Barbara was fully awake by then, staring at the scene as if she were still dreaming. She screamed for only a moment before the man shot her, too. Two people dead, just like that. Two people who weren’t supposed to be there.
From inside the closet Emily heard sounds of footsteps rushing into the bedroom. More men, though she couldn’t tell how many.
“What the fuck are you doing?” shrieked one man.
“They startled me,” said the shooter. “What was I supposed to do?”
“Not kill them,” said a third. “We don’t kill people. We don’t even carry guns. Why are you bringing a gun?”
“You’re a moron,” said the shooter. “We break into homes. Did it never occur to you that just such a thing might happen? And that we’d be the ones staring at the barrel of a shotgun? That’s why I carry a gun, asshole.”
“You’re the asshole.”
“No, you’re the asshole. I just saved our lives!”
“By killing two people! That’s life in prison! Jesus!”
Emily listened, terrified but alert. The man who had shot her parents sounded bright, an articulate murderer. She would remember his voice for the rest of her life.
“Where’s the daughter?” said the second man. “They have a kid, you said. Where’s the kid?”
“What difference does it make?” said the shooter. “Just grab what you can and get the hell out.”
“I’m not grabbing anything,” said the third man. “This is not cool, Frank, not cool at all. I’m outa here.”
So off the third man ran, down the stairs and out the back door. Emily committed the killer’s name to memory: Frank. Well-spoken, brutal, murderous Frank. Unconcerned with her whereabouts, for even if they found her, he would simply kill her as well.
“You running scared, too?” the man named Frank said to the second burglar. Getting no response, he said, “Just go through this room with me. There’s jewels, I’m sure of it, money. Check the wall pictures, there might be a safe in back.”
The two men began rummaging through her parents’ room, opening drawers. There was a large jewelry box inside her mother’s armoire, and she could hear him throwing it open, grabbing the jewelry inside. There was also a watch box where her father kept one of his prize possessions, an antique Waltham pocket watch his great-grandfather had owned. His great-grandfather had been a train conductor, and the watch had a steam engine engraved on it. He’d never had it appraised and considered its value to be sentimental, but the watch was authentic and, had he researched it, would have fetched several hundred dollars at the time. Frank had no idea of the watch’s worth, but there was something about it that caught his eye, something that made him want to keep it, which is what he ultimately did and why he ultimately died.
Justice took its time, she thought, remembering the watch. Justice delayed was not justice denied, as the famous quote had it. Not at all. Justice delayed was justice perfected, savored like the taste of something one would only taste once.
The men might have found little Emily in the closet had a distant siren not spooked them. People intruding into other people’s homes tend to be on edge, and when they heard the siren they glanced at each other, a wordless communication Emily did not see. They grabbed what few things they’d taken and fled down the stairs and out the door. She waited for what seemed hours, although it was only about fifteen minutes, then she crept out of the closet, walked to the phone on the nightstand and, standing numbly over her father’s dead body, dialed 911.
Emily went to live with her mother’s sister and her husband in Santa Barbara after “the tragedy,” as everyone called it. She did not get along with her Aunt Susan, and was frightened by her Uncle Joseph, a man who was even more stern with his adopted daughter than he was with his own two. Emily always had the feeling living with them that she’d been thrust into their midst, taken in because, well, somebody had to, and that she was damaged goods. What they never knew—what no one else ever knew—was that she’d been in the closet and seen the cold-blooded murder of her parents. She believed the reason she has not told the police was because her life’s mission had been set at the instant the first bullet flew; she would spend her life setting the scales back in balance, learning the skills she would need, from replacing her identity to firing a handgun with precision, to bring that circle to its fullness. She did not know when or how, but the time would come; she believed it as surely as religious people believed in God or their reward in an afterlife. Emily would prepare, remain alert, and wait with supreme patience for that fleeting opportunity, that chance of a lifetime, when the great wrong of her life could be righted. For that reason only she had told the police she’d been under her bed, in her own bedroom. For that reason only she had never told anyone about the gun she took from her father’s closet when she was allowed back in the house to pack her things. The watch they knew about; its empty case was among the little evidence left behind by the killers. They’d not had enough time to take much more than jewelry and cash from her father’s wallet and her mother’s purse. And in exchange they had left nothing, no fingerprints, no hastily abandoned burglar’s tools. All they’d left behind them was a trail that quickly went cold. But Emily knew: a man named Frank, her father’s gun, and the watch no one would really think anything of. A few small things, but truly precious.
After graduating high school, Emily moved to St. Paul to live with her girlfriend at the time. Cassy was from Minneapolis and had met Emily through an ad in a small lesbian magazine. She was also twelve years older than Emily, who, at eighteen, was old enough to make her own decisions but not old enough to make wise ones. Against her aunt and uncle’s wishes she packed up her used Mustang and drove to Minnesota, where she enrolled in the University of Minnesota’s St. Paul campus and very quickly discovered that sometimes age mattered. Her relationship with Cassy only lasted a year, but Emily liked St. Paul; she enjoyed the distance of the place and the harshness of its winters, and she stayed there.
It was shortly afterward, on her twentieth birthday, she decided to disappear. She had no intention of moving, and it would be easy enough to tell the few friends she had that she was now someone else: changing one’s name was not all that uncommon, and she had been telling people various versions of a made-up life since she’d moved to St. Paul. People did not want to
hear that her parents had been shot in bed, it was definitely a downer, and the ones who did were beneath her contempt. That was how it came to be that very few people who knew Emily knew her past. She protected it from them, just as she protected her other secrets as she waited patiently to tell them to the only three people who mattered: three men who had intruded into her life and never left. For that, for privacy, for escape, for so many reasons, Emily Lapinksy became Bo Sweetzer. She didn’t know where the name came from, only that it was on her lips one early morning as she awoke from a dream in which her father was standing over her and her mother was crying. “Emily,” her father kept saying in the dream. He was disappointed in her. She didn’t know how she knew that, or why he was disappointed, only that he was. “Emily,” he said, shaking his head. She replied, “My name is Bo. My name is Bo.” She awoke saying it, and just as surely added, “Bo Sweetzer.” She was immediately convinced her father had been disappointed because ten years had passed and no justice had been found. She would bring him peace, she knew then and there. She would be Bo Sweetzer, and she would find a way to end it in the only way it could be ended, even if it took her the rest of her life.
She dropped out of the University and started making jewelry, a pastime she’d had that she connected with the loss in her life. It became a passion, and, to her delight, her income. She had never been much for a 9-5 job and within a year she was running a business from a custom catalog. Bo and Behold, jewelry made to order, quickly became a success, but never a huge one. She didn’t want the notoriety, nor the pressure of running a business any bigger than could be managed from her apartment. Once the internet came around she launched BoAndBeholdJewelry.com, and would also sell her items on eBay and BidderSweet, online auction websites. It was there, on BidderSweet, one Sunday afternoon as she was looking around, that an alert showed up in her message box. She’s had them set up on a dozen sites to let her know when certain items she was interested in became available. It had been a lot of work for nothing, sifting through hundreds of ads for crap, some of them for treasure, but none of them turning up the one thing she wanted. And then, that day, there it was: an antique watch for sale. She looked at the photograph and couldn’t believe her eyes. She knew that watch very well, including the dent above the smoke rising from the train’s engine. She had caused that dent when her father had let baby Emily hold the watch and she had promptly swung it, slamming it against her crib. He had reminded her of it many times, as a way of saying, “See this? This will always remind me of you as a baby. It’s a great dent, I think, one of those dents in life that means something.”