by J. R. Rain
Her words stabbed me straight through the heart. I wanted to protest and say “But you don’t know for sure that Gerda was the cause,” but words failed me. Mostly because I knew that Tabby was right. I had been the cause.
Oh, sweet Jesus.
And then it struck me. Hard. What the hell was the walking corpse of Max Richter doing at Tabby’s grandmother’s old folks home? And then it kept on hitting me. If mice are my worst fear, then...Gerda’s father must be her worst fucking nightmare. Hell, anyone’s worst nightmare. So what if Nana or some other Mead witch had turned that dead bastard loose as a sort of payback curse?
And now he’s out to get her. And Gerda has the baby, and who knows what might happen to the baby. Shit.
But first we had to know if Gerda killed Amanda. Or, in the very least, find Gerda.
Find her before he found her. “He” being, of course, the walking corpse of her serial killer father.
Of course, that was assuming I lived long enough to survive my curse—and that mice hadn’t taken over the house and were waiting inside with their twitching whiskers and creepy little buck-toothed grins.
How the hell did I get into this shit? All I’d been looking for was a warm heart or two.
Chapter Eighteen
The moon was now clearly up and over the rolling hills of the Santa Ana Mountains in the east, and the air was cold with a fine mist that shimmered in the gloaming. I was very alert for any signs of mice, but didn’t see any.
With the pieces pointing toward Gerda as the killer, and the fate of the child I never knew in question, I felt a little foolish worrying over the mice. However, the little shits still made my skin crawl, and to be attacked as I had been by hundreds of them in some supernatural effort to kill me, I deserved the right to be wary of them.
And it was even possible that these mice were all copies of that same mouse that had gotten Jimmy, a mouse summoned from the grave and cloned in some bizarre witchcraft.
“Let’s go,” I said, braver than I felt. Tabby had proven her toughness and I wasn’t about to act like a coward in front of her.
Together we made the way up to my house. My garage door was open—the only indication of my flight from my home the evening before. My mind went back once again to Gerda, even while my eyes searched crazily for signs of the mice.
Gerda had never before shown any violent tendencies, except for the one time she tried to kill me when she was half-crazy with depression, and on four different drugs, to boot. That was understandable and easily forgivable. Sure, I had had an affair with all intentions of leaving Gerda, and if Gerda had discovered the letters I had thought were so ingeniously hidden, did she have enough rage in her to kill? Had there been evil sleeping inside her that none of us had seen, not cops, not counselors, not even a loving husband?
To slit someone’s throat and steal her baby was an act of pure hatred. I would not have believed Gerda had such inclinations in her. True, her personality had changed a hundred and eighty degrees, but had it also changed enough for her to have it in herself to kill? Had she become her own greatest fear—to be like her father?
You know from newspapers and the nightly news that when someone fools around with someone else’s mate, unthinkable violence can occur from any members of the triangle. In high school I’d had a football coach killed in such a dispute: he was having an affair with someone else’s wife. When the husband found out, he marched right onto campus, found the coach in his office in the school’s weight room and promptly blew my coach’s brains out, with sixty of us high school football players looking on with utter shock.
Gerda probably lost it and killed Amanda. And Gerda might be bubbling up her own cauldron of wickedness and working up her own spell just for me. Maybe her father was indeed her greatest fear, but maybe she now somehow controlled him enough to put him on my trail.
If so, then why had he breezed past me fresh from a murder, barely even glancing my way?
Craziness. All of it.
“You’re worried about the mice?” Tabby said, and I realized I must have been standing there for half a minute, eyeing the approach to the house.
I said nothing, just made a firm beeline for the door.
We found a dozen mice in the driveway, squashed flat as a pancake under the tires of my bike. More were flattened in the garage. I hoped these little shits didn’t come back from the dead. That, I’m sure, would have given me a heart attack. I could see it now: attack of the zombie mice.
And then, to my utter horror, one of the mice moved.
Shit.
My heart ramming in my chest like a hatching alien, I realized that the movement had been a cockroach roaming over the body of the mouse. Even after a day of bizarre revelations, there was still room to be shocked.
I stopped and caught my breath, Tabby nearly bumping into me from behind. “See?” I said. “I wasn’t lying.”
“For a change.” She looked at the mice scattered around, evidence of either an actual goddamned curse or else a testament to my sloppy housekeeping since Gerda had moved out. Too bad I was fairly neat for an alcoholic, cheating bum, which left “curse” as the only option.
“You okay?” asked Tabby.
“Who knows?”
“You can tell me where to look and I’ll check and see if I can find anything.”
Yeah, right.
“No. Thanks, but I can do this. We need to know for sure if my wife killed your sister, and I need to be the one to check the letters, to see if they have been tampered with. And if the mice come...well, I’ve survived them before.”
Brave talk for someone whose heart was beating a mile a minute. But there was no way around it. I had to check my secret stash of love-struck memorabilia and find out if it had not been as secret as I’d hoped.
I unlocked the front door, bypassing the garage altogether. The house was chilly and silent. I had left a smattering of lights on from yesterday morning’s rush to work—a morning that seemed a lifetime ago. In my living room, the lamp was on. The house looked like someone late for work had swept through here.
Once I was sure there were no mice present, I made my way up to the second floor. Tabitha was right behind me.
* * *
I stopped at the entrance to the attic.
“You want to join me?” I asked.
“In the attic?” she asked, hands on hips, face haggard from stress and exhaustion but still very beautiful. She had a brightness in her eyes and a resoluteness in her face. She wanted some answers, as did I, and I knew she would do whatever it would take to find them.
I had a profound sense of the creeps. Alarms were clanging deep in my brain, and I had to will myself from fleeing from the house. All the safety of electric lights and relative sanity would be deleted by the utter blackness of the attic, a blackness that made me want to puke with fear.
Calm down, Al, I tried to console myself. There’s no walking corpse up there, or even mice. The mice, for at least the time being, are gone, maybe even gone forever.
That, of course, was wishful thinking. I was more under the impression that since my flight, the mice had time to reorganize for another assault, maybe fueled by whatever spell Nana had been mixing up when she’d been murdered by Max Richter. At least they didn’t just materialize out of thin air, because some of them had been living creatures—creatures that could also die.
Maybe the witch had used two different kinds of spells: one to organize all the mice of Orange County, like an evil fucking Pied Piper, and the other to raise the dead, or at least bring back the image of the dead. Obviously, Gerda’s father had been worm food long ago and could now be only bones. And if there was such a thing as God, then Max’s sorry ass was spit-skewered and slow-roasting over the high flames of hell.
“Either go up or get out of the way,” Tabby said, impatient.
I yanked down the ladder that would lead up unto the attic. A familiar odor of mildew and dust wafted down after the ladder. Tabby sneezed.
And just as I started up the ladder, something on the floor down the hall near the bedrooms caught my eye, but Tabby was right behind me, eager to find the answer to her sister’s death, and so I didn’t stop to analyze it or its significance until later; because I was now eager to see if my wife had discovered my letters, if my wife had killed my ex-lover, and if my wife had kidnapped my baby.
But that something on the floor down the hall had looked suspiciously like a mouse.
Watching me.
Chapter Nineteen
Inside the attic, I flicked on the light switch. Above me and to the left, a dust-covered bulb did its best to illuminate the gloomy room. The darker corners of the attic seemed immune to light, and it was these dark corners that my eyes searched for signs of the little shits.
So far, no mice; almost as if it had never happened.
Yeah, right.
And what did I expect, some well-calculated ambush? If the mice were here, I would have seen them. Or, at least, more than just the one, if that had indeed been a mouse. Anyway, something in me began to grasp hold of the fact that maybe I had seen the last of the mice: a one-shot deal.
I let this hope take hold in me, that despite what Tabby believed, Nana’s curse had died with her. And now the world was back to normal—if I overlooked murder, kidnapping, and a serial killer rising from the grave.
Against the far wall of the attic were piled many boxes. The boxes in front contained the Christmas ornaments, and the ones in the back contained all kinds of shit, ranging from school yearbooks to trophies, old clothes and wedding gifts we had never even bothered opening. The kind of boxes that stayed taped shut until you either moved or died. Well, it was here in an unmarked box that I had kept the letters from Amanda. The box was within a box, under a stack of my old college research papers. A beautiful hiding place, I had once believed.
A quick overview of the attic told me that everything seemed in order as I had last seen it, which would have been the last time I’d sat up there and read those letters, drinking scotch and pretending not to cry.
We walked over to the stack of boxes, skirting an old exercise bike and two big stand-up fans. A fine film of dust swirled around our ankles as we passed. The floor creaked with just about every step. Real spooky. I had goose pimples.
From the dust, I’d have guessed Gerda had never been up there, since she was a bigger neat freak than me. Nevertheless, I pulled out boxes and handed them to Tabby, who then stacked them off to the side, until I came across a medium-sized white box. This, too, was unmarked. I pulled the fifteen-pound box out and walked underneath the light, sitting the box on top of an ugly coffee table I’d inherited from my first college dorm.
“What are all these bottles doing up here?” Tabby asked, waving to the collection beside the table. The empties were dust free, and if the remains were pooled together, they might amount to a nice Long Island iced tea without the ice.
“Looks like the kind of place where somebody might sit and remember,” I said.
“The past is dead,” Tabby said.
“Not around the Mead family,” I said. “It can just get up and walk the hell over—”
“Petey first,” she reminded me. “Then you can have your breakdown.”
I took a deep breath. So far, if Gerda had come across the letters, she sure as hell left no evidence of it. For some reason, I had expected at least something up here to be out of place, to have given her away. And, maybe she had secrets of her own. Maybe some of those boxes held old spell books, experiments, the bones and skins of reptiles.
I opened the box, pulling out the cardboard flaps that were tucked within each other. Everything was very neat, just as I had left it when I had last mooned over the letters. There were two stacks of papers, in two neat columns. I had placed on top of each stack a couple of college papers in which I had received a perfect hundred in college. The papers were still sitting there. The stacks had the appearance of old college papers. A perfect hiding place.
Lifting the thick piles of paper out of the box and setting them on the ground at my feet, I uncovered the small box sitting in the corner of the bigger box. There was still a clear piece of tape holding the top flap down. Everything seemed to be in order.
I lifted out the box and flicked the tape open with a slice from my fingernail. Tabby loomed over me, breathing heavily in my ear, her breath warm and stimulating. Her chin touched my shoulder as she watched me open the box.
The letters were there, but they were torn into pieces, every last one of them.
And there was one rumpled piece of lined notebook paper, with two words penned by Gerda’s frantic hand: Curse you.
Son-of-a-bitch.
Chapter Twenty
My heart wanted to break. All those precious loving words twisted and torn into pieces. Someday, I swore, I would tape up every last one.
Tabby let out a low whistle. “Maybe you didn’t know your wife as well as you thought you did.”
“Maybe nobody knows anybody,” I replied, thinking about how Amanda had hidden both the pregnancy and the family’s long lineage of witches. And how Gerda must have kept a key. I wonder how many times she’d slipped in while I was away. Maybe she’d stood over me while I was snoring away in bed, testing the edge of her knife, contemplating.
“Okay, so now we can definitely give her ‘psycho’ points,” Tabby said. “But we already know that your wife knew about Amanda, remember? She was the one who called my sister to tell her that you were married.”
“Sure,” I said. “But I was able to hide the extent of our relationship. For Gerda’s sake—and perhaps so I wouldn’t wake up on the wrong side of a knife blade—I made it seem like an inconsequential affair. Just a few dates. Nothing serious.”
“Until she found these letters and saw that it was more serious than that. That you, in fact, loved Amanda.”
“And you think that would drive her over the edge?”
Tabby thought hard about it, and as she thought, I saw that her eyes were moist. It isn’t easy talking about your murdered sister, especially when it hasn’t even been 24 hours. Even for a hardened cop.
“I suspect,” she said, and paused. She tried again. “I suspect it was a series of events, Al. And each flamed a deeper and deeper rage. When do you think she found these letters?”
“No idea, but they were untouched maybe two months ago. She must have kept a key.”
“So it’s a fresh discovery, but she obviously suspected more.”
“Like you said, a series of events. You think she’s the killer?” I asked.
“Put it this way, Al: I have no fucking doubt. The next step is to figure out where she is.”
“The detectives told me they’d searched her apartment and have it staked out. But she’s too smart to waltz into a trap.”
Tabby said, “Sounds like she’s smarter than anyone thought. Fooled the shrinks into believing she was okay, fooled the police into thinking she wasn’t a threat, and fooled herself into believing that serial killing wasn’t a genetic disorder.”
“Can I ask you something?”
She shrugged. I went for it.
“Back when Tattoo Boy was harassing us, you reached in your jacket and came out with a badge. Are you by any chance carrying?”
She gave me a rueful grin that said she was ready for anything, and I shuddered a little. If the Mead family indeed practiced “An eye for an eye,” I might cause the cold-blooded killing of yet another person. But I couldn’t deny my own lust for revenge, which now seemed as powerful as the lust I’d once felt for Amanda.
“What now?” I asked, afraid to ask but doing it anyway.
“I need to think.”
“Well, I don’t think we can do much in the middle of the night,” I said, yawning. “My brain’s fried.”
I put the letters back in the shoebox, closed the unmarked white box, and proceeded to re-stack, with the aid of Tabby, the rest of the scattered boxes.
Eyes
burning, brow dewy with beads of sweat, we stepped down into the upstairs’ hallway. I lifted and then snapped shut the attic stairs, causing pain to shoot through my spine. I stood for a few moments with my left knuckle digging into the middle of my lower back. The pain seemed to be suggesting that I had possibly lifted the stairs a little too carelessly.
“Okay,” Tabby said, glancing at her watch. “Two hours until dawn. We may as well catch a few winks before planning our next move. Maybe one of us will dream up the answer.”
I glanced at the bedrooms. No way in hell was I sleeping alone in this place, and the Mead house was far enough away that I’d probably snooze and crash the bike on the way over.
But there was also no way I was going to ask Amanda’s lovely sister to come to bed with me, barely twenty-two hours after Amanda had been murdered. Even though my intentions were decidedly pure—I was scared as shit of possessed mice.
“Umm, how about we sleep in the living room?” I said. “You can have the couch, and I’ll take the Barcalounger.”
“I can see why Amanda fell for your charm,” Tabby said.
“Sarcasm isn’t cute at four in the morning,” I said.
“I don’t do cute,” she said. “And don’t make any jokes about me needing my beauty sleep.”
“Maybe you need some garlic and silver bullets and voodoo dolls.”
“It’s okay. You locked the door, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, but the mice are already inside, remember?”
“It’s not mice I’m worried about.”
“Easy for you to say. Your best friend didn’t die from a mouse bite and you didn’t get cursed with your deepest fear.”
“Mice are one thing. A zombie Max Richter is another.”
For some reason, I’d clung to the illusion of safety because of the distance we’d put between us and the old folks’ home. Maybe it was because the Surgeon of Silicon Valley had been on foot, and I couldn’t wrap my head around the dead goon driving a car. But what use was logic like that? Logic no longer had a reliable place in my world.