A Party to Murder

by John Inman

  Jamie turned to him, his face suddenly lit with a familiar glimmer of mischief. It was his “it’s Saturday night, let’s get rowdy and raise hell, screw the consequences, I’ve got bail money” look. Derek knew it well.

  “Well, yeah,” Jamie patiently explained. “What other criteria do you need?”

  “I’m vaguely appalled by that devil-may-care light in your eyes,” Derek drawled. He tore his gaze from Jamie’s sexy grin and back to the bridge in front of them. “Almost as appalled as I am by the prospect of driving over that ricketyass bridge. Think the other guests got across already?”

  Jamie thought about that for a minute. “Actually, we don’t even know if there are any other guests.”

  “You’re right,” Derek agreed. “We don’t. What sort of idiots accept a party invitation in the middle of nowhere when they don’t know who sent the invitation or how many guests will be there when they arrive?”

  “Idiots like us. I say we go for it. Cross the bridge.”

  “What if it collapses?”

  Jamie gave a dismissive wave at the structure in front of them. “Oh pshaw. It looks like it’s been standing for a couple of centuries already. What are the odds of it collapsing tonight at the exact moment we’re scurrying across?”

  Derek chewed on the inside of his jaw. “I hate it when you say pshaw. It sounds so bucolic.”

  “I’m a bucolic sort of guy.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re a citified wimp! But you’re right. Statistically, if the bridge has withstood the elements this long, it should be safe enough for the next two minutes.”

  “Exactly. And we definitely need to get where we’re going, because I could really use a drink right now. If this party is hosted by teetotalers, I’m going to be extremely upset. Cross the fucking bridge.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  Jamie shrugged. “So are you. Cross the bridge.”

  “We should have packed our own booze.”

  “You’re right, but it’s too late now. Oh wait, look up ahead. What’s that tucked in among the brambles and the blackberry bushes? Can it be? It is! It’s a liquor store!”

  There was nothing ahead but trees and mud and rain. “You’re being sarcastic, aren’t you?”

  “Who me? Cross the bridge.”

  Derek slipped the car into Drive. “If we die, thanks for the blowjob.”

  “No, thank you,” Jamie innocently beamed, licking his lips.

  And with both men holding their breath, Derek floored the car and sailed out across the bridge.

  Still holding their breath a moment later, they came to a sloshing, jolting stop inside a foot-deep mudhole on the far side. They turned to peer through the rear window. In the red glow of taillights, the wooden structure gave a shudder, then seemed to settle.

  “See,” Jamie said. “We’re fine.”

  As if his words had conjured disaster out of thin air, there came a horrific grinding, tumbling, rushing noise that seemed to be churning its way up from the depths of the earth itself. A surge of dark water poured down the arroyo and dashed against the side of the bridge. With a heave upward amid a tiny explosion of splintered timbers, the bridge collapsed in upon itself and disappeared without a trace. One second it was there, the next it was gone, washed away in the churning flood below.

  “Well, poop,” Jamie whispered in the sudden silence. His eyes, Derek noticed, were as big as dinner plates.

  Less than eagerly, they turned back to study the muddy, rutted path ahead. The storm had sprinkled it with evergreen bows and pine cones ripped from the living trees. The trees themselves appeared beaten down and half stripped bare, their heads bowed in the gusting wind. Fighting to stand upright against the onslaught, they shook and thrashed on both sides of the road. Derek didn’t want to think about what might be lurking among the spookyass shadows between their battered trunks. He forced his attention dead ahead at the disappearing roadway weaving a winding narrow mud-holed path through the trees toward a stormy, uncertain distance.

  “This had better be a damn good party,” Derek muttered.

  Jamie grunted in agreement. Terse for Jamie, Derek thought, who usually blathered on endlessly about everything. With Jamie’s fingers tightening on his thigh, Derek tapped the accelerator enough to urge the car slowly forward into that nightmarish tunnel burrowing its way between the trees ahead. The car rocked and lurched as they sloshed and splashed and squelched along, sinking hubcap-deep into every rain-glutted pothole they passed.

  Derek decided on the spot that the only enjoyable part of this miserable night was having Jamie at his side to suffer through it with him. Creeped out by the storm and the collapsing bridge and the wind and the spooky, shadowy trees, Derek was nevertheless vaguely astounded by how much he enjoyed having Jamie with him. After all, Jamie was just a friend, although there was no denying they had suddenly slipped into the realm of fuckbuddydom lately. So what did that mean exactly? Did it mean Jamie had suddenly become something more than a friend?

  Dumb question.

  Derek allowed a smile to play at the corners of his mouth as he drove down the miserable, bumpy cow path. He glanced down at Jamie’s hand still resting on his thigh, and his smile widened.

  “Don’t worry,” he softly said. “We’ll be fine.”

  Jamie didn’t speak, but his fingers tightened on Derek’s leg, and that was answer enough.

  Turning his attention back to the road, Derek drove on through the storm. Comforted by Jamie’s touch, he hummed a quiet song deep in his throat to the rhythm of the whooshing wiper blades.

  With hail still clattering across the roof of the car and the bridge now washed out behind them, he suddenly wondered what the heck he was humming about.

  He also began to wonder—all kidding aside—if they’d really be fine at all.

  Chapter Two

  DEREK’S LITTLE tune died in his throat when Jamie suddenly unclamped his seat belt and leaned forward to press his nose against the windshield. Doing his Rottweiler impersonation again.

  Jamie’s breath fogged the glass. “You realize we’re trapped, right? We can’t drive out of here now, even if we want to. Plus, we’ve got ourselves so buried in the wilderness we don’t know where the heck we are. I keep expecting to see Bigfoot chuck a mud clod at us as we slosh past.”

  Hearing an edge of panic in Jamie’s voice made Derek try a little harder to wrench reason from chaos. “Hey, you’re the one who told me to cross the bridge. Besides, how lost can we be? We have our cell phones. And according to the invitation, our destination is only fifteen miles down this bumpyass road. Our host will know what to do.”

  “Whoever our host may be.”

  Derek grunted reluctant agreement. “Yes. Whoever our host may be.”

  By wrenching the steering wheel first one way, then the other, Derek navigated around a minefield of ruts, washboards, trenches, and potholes, all the while imagining strategic nuts and bolts unscrewing themselves from the Toyota’s undercarriage as they bounced along. He peered out over his clenched fists gripping the wheel and wondered anew what the hell had possessed him and Jamie to accept such peculiar invitations to begin with.

  Peculiar, for one thing, because the invitations had not been mailed. They had been shoved under each of their front doors in the middle of the night—Derek’s under the door of his downtown apartment, Jamie’s under his apartment door in Hillcrest, just up the hill from the city proper. Perhaps it was that proof of familiarity with their individual circumstances that helped convince them to accept the invitations. Clearly a friend had delivered them, right? Who else would know where they both lived?

  Not for the first time since the letters arrived five days earlier, Derek shook his head at the weirdness of it. And the weirdness didn’t stop with the strange way the invitations had shown up on their doorsteps. It extended onward to the two of them accepting the anonymous invitations without so much as batting an eyelash. Hey, it’ll be fun, they told each other. A lark. A funny
wee mystery they would both laugh about some day.

  Well, what with his Toyota dismantling itself beneath him, the nerve-racking collapse of the rickety bridge, and the fact that they were tooling along through the worst thunderstorm he had seen in years with no way to turn around and get the hell out, Derek figured the giggle factor on this bizarre enterprise had deteriorated considerably in the last few minutes.

  “Don’t forget this is all your fault,” he griped, impatiently wiping a smear of fog from the windshield with his coat sleeve so he could see where the hell he was going. “It was the postscript on the invitation. That’s really why we’re here, isn’t it? All that business about the host offering ‘heart-stopping door prizes’ to all the guests. You really are a greedy little twit, you know that?”

  Jamie didn’t appear to be listening. “Door prizes. Greedy,” he muttered, staring out into the night. He then laid a gentle hand on Derek’s arm and turned his gaze on him. Leaning close, he whispered in a sweetly questioning voice. “What if we fall in love? What happens to our friendship then?”

  Derek rolled his eyes. Happily it was dark enough that Jamie couldn’t see him do it. “Can we try to cope with one disaster at a time, please? Besides, we’re not going to fall in love. We’re merely bonking each other due to a momentary shortage of other bonkable partners. It’s a matter of supply and demand. Like pork bellies and soybeans. That’s all it is.”

  Jamie plucked his hand from Derek’s arm, and Derek was pretty sure by the way he did it that he wasn’t pleased. He knew he was right when Jamie said, “That’s not very romantic.”

  “No,” Derek mumbled, more to himself than to Jamie. “I guess it isn’t. But then, this really isn’t a romance, is it? This is simply a sexual interlude between friends.”

  Jamie’s voice was ice. “Is that what it is? A sexual interlude?” Yep, he definitely wasn’t amused.

  Derek relented. “Well, maybe it’s a little romantic.”

  And suddenly, as Derek manhandled the Toyota around another pothole, confused not only by what was going on outside the car, but in, a memory washed over him. A memory from childhood. He and Jamie standing outside Roosevelt Junior High School, saying goodbye for the day before hopping their respective school buses and heading home. It had been a very odd moment, Derek remembered now. And it was made even odder by the fact that this particular memory had come back to haunt him several times over the intervening years. It had popped up in Derek’s subconscious so often, in fact, that by now he had it memorized perfectly. Every little bitty bit of it.

  He and Jamie had been fourteen, each in the cast-iron grip of puberty, with all the earth-shattering astonishments that entailed. They had shot up over the summer, standing now three inches taller than they had a year ago. Their shoulders were broadening, their hips narrowing. Jamie’s blond hair had lost a little of its curl, and now if there was the tiniest amount of wind, it swayed atop his head like a field of tawny wheat. Jamie had a sheen of blond peach fuzz on his chin as yet unmown, while Derek had actually started shaving twice a week due to his dark beard popping through prematurely. Derek had only recently discovered the joys of masturbation, and he found himself thumping away at his poor pecker every chance he got. It was sort of funny, and a little confusing, how often he thought of Jamie when he did.

  With streams of screaming kids pouring past their quiet island of stillness, Derek had stood staring at Jamie as Jamie stood staring back at him. A strange quiet had taken hold of them both. Jamie’s lips were slightly parted, as if he were equally astounded by the weirdness of the moment.

  Wrapped inside their well of silence and oblivious to everything going on around them, Derek had reached out, all the while watching his hand with wide-open eyes as if it belonged to somebody else. He spread his fingers and pressed them against Jamie’s chest, leaving them there as he felt the sudden intake of Jamie’s breath at the unexpected touch. The heat of Jamie’s warm skin radiated through the thin T-shirt he wore, and that heat was like a surge of electricity shooting through the palm of Derek’s hand.

  “You’re growing up,” Derek said in a hushed voice. “You’re getting handsome.”

  For some bizarre reason, Jamie’s blue eyes misted over in a prelude to tears. “So are you,” he whispered back.

  A bus horn blasted behind them, and they both jumped. Derek turned to spot his driver waving for him to get the hell on the bus, he didn’t have all day.

  Derek lifted his hand from Jamie’s chest and stammered, “L-later, I guess.”

  Jamie swallowed hard and since he couldn’t seem to find his voice, he simply nodded. They separated then, the moment over.

  That night, as Derek lay in his upstairs bedroom touching himself beneath his NASCAR quilt, he squeezed his eyes shut and remembered Jamie’s breath lifting his chest against Derek’s hand, felt Jamie’s heat pulsing through his T-shirt to Derek’s palm. When Derek’s orgasm exploded out of him, he had to bite down on his tongue to keep from crying out. Wouldn’t his parents have loved that? A moment later he tasted blood while his heart hammered in his ears and his juices began to puddle and crisp across his belly and chest.

  Driving now down this god-awful muddy cow path with Jamie still here, still at his side, Derek smiled to himself, reminiscing.

  Without thinking, he reached over in the dark and spread his hand across the side of Jamie’s face. When Jamie turned his head into his hand and laid a kiss to his palm, Derek’s smile widened.

  “Whatever it is we’re doing with each other, I’m glad you’re here,” he said, his voice just loud enough to burrow a path through the storm.

  “So am I,” Jamie answered. Derek sat mesmerized as a spark of shimmering light flared from Jamie’s eyes in the glare of the dashboard lights. A grin danced across Jamie’s lips. “I have plans for later,” Jamie teased. “Intimate plans, if you know what I mean.”

  Derek shook his head and laughed. This time he didn’t try to hide the rolling of his eyes. “Trust me, Hot Stuff. I always know exactly what you mean.”

  JAMIE LEANED in close and checked the odometer. “That’s fourteen miles,” he said. “The house should be coming up.”

  Derek responded with a quick nod. Most of his attention appeared focused on avoiding potholes and staying on the road. “I can’t really look. Can you see any lights anywhere?”

  “No. Yes!” Jamie squealed, jumping up and down in his seat, rocking the car like a preschooler. “Right there! Through the trees. See? See?”

  Blinding sheets of rain slapped the windshield, making it almost impossible to see anything. But off to the right, following a swipe of the wipers, Jamie’s vision cleared for a brief second—long enough for him to spot an array of golden lights shimmering among an all-but-solid wall of pine trees, thrashing and swaying in the wind. The lights were spilling through a dozen or more windows, indicating the presence of a large house tucked away out here in the middle of nowhere. In the flash of a lightning bolt that almost startled him out of his socks, he caught a glimpse of ornately angled rooflines and rain-soaked, peeling clapboard walls.

  Jamie couldn’t believe it. “Holy cow,” he cried, sounding far less excited than he had a moment ago. “It looks like the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, only dumpier!”

  “Well, that can’t be good,” Derek commented wryly, tapping the brakes a little too hard and causing the car to slue sideways again. It bounced to a stop inside another lake-sized mudhole. “If I recall correctly, you hated the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. You whined about the ghosts being way too realistic, remember? Look closer. Are you sure it doesn’t look more like the Tiki Hut? You loved that.”

  “Oh shut up,” Jamie groused, waiting for the wiper to make another pass so he could examine the lights in the trees again.

  Derek leaned forward too, both of them now trying to see through the driving rain and hail. “See a turnoff anywhere? A driveway?” he asked.

  “I can’t see anything. No, wait. There it is. See there, by tha
t big boulder? It’s a roadway leading toward the house.” He chewed his bottom lip. “But don’t turn, Derek. I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to go to this stupid party. I don’t care about the stupid door prizes. Just keep driving forward. This road must wind up somewhere, and wherever it is, we can work our way back to civilization from there.”

  Derek made a clucking sound. “No can do. Where the turnoff begins, this road also ends. Look.”

  Jamie forced himself to look where Derek was pointing, and sure enough, there it was. A solid wall of trees just past the spot where the driveway to the mansion began. With the collapsed bridge at their backs and the impenetrable trees in front, they had no choice but to approach the creepy house stuck in among the trees. There was nowhere else to go.

  “Still need that drink?” Derek asked. He sounded like he already knew the answer.

  “More than ever,” Jamie sighed.

  He flipped down the visor and lit the light on the little vanity mirror positioned there. After giving his hair a once-over and even leaning close to check for eye boogers, he finally flipped the visor out of the way and stated flatly, “Drive on. I’m ready.”

  Derek grinned. “You don’t look ready.”

  “Oh hush,” Jamie answered, laying his hand on Derek’s thigh for strength, or maybe just because he liked putting it there.

  “You da boss,” Derek crooned, and a moment later they sloshed through the final mudhole and made the turn.

  Except for the wailing of the storm, silence descended on the interior of the car while they both craned forward, staring at the old house looming up in front of them—drawing closer and closer and closer….

  IT WAS an ancient three-story mansion. Desperate to flee the storm, they quickly parked, hurled themselves from the car, and ran for the front porch, vaulting over puddles with their heads hunkered under their coats. A sudden sizzle of lightning and boom of thunder gave them wings, and they fairly flew for shelter, dragging each other forward, half laughing, half screaming in terror.