What We Kill

by Howard Odentz

  I think she puts its collar around his ankle.

  That’s messed up, but there are a lot of messed up people in Meadowfield. Coked out dads, bored housewives, cheaters, cybersex addicts, you name it, they live here. You don’t have to dig too deep to find them. They lurk right beneath the surface.

  Around the back of the Coles’ garage is a door that’s almost hidden by all of the shrubbery. The door is never locked, so that’s where I go.

  Inside the garage is Mr. Cole’s BMW and Marcy’s beater car. I guess a friend of Mr. Cole’s sold it to Marcy’s dad really cheap, so she has wheels. It’s big, way bigger than most cars these days, and probably older than me, but it’s perfect for Marcy. She’s usually our designated driver when we go out—not because we party, but because her car is large and roomy. Even if we did party, she would probably be our designated driver anyway.

  She can’t drink because of the stuff she takes.

  ‘I saw you at The Stumps last night. You were pretty wasted,’ Grafton Applewhite said. ‘You, Anders, that weird kid you hang out with and . . . and Marcy Cole.’

  His words slip inside one ear, momentarily coil around my brainstem then slip out the other. There’s no way Marcy could have been hammered last night. Her meds are way too important for her to screw up everything with drinking. She’s too diligent about things like that.

  As I stare at the dull green hood of Marcy’s monster car, I try to remember being chauffeured around town last night, but I can’t. There’s a gaping, black hole in my memory where we should all live, partying at The Stumps and getting wasted like Grafton Applewhite said.

  Nothing comes except for the faint mewling of farm animals and a vague flash of deep, dark eyes.

  I lick my lips, turn, and almost fall over as another wave of dizziness rolls over me, not quite as strong as before. The room tilts sideways. My legs get wobbly for a moment, but I manage to steady myself against the hood of Marcy’s car.

  Crap.

  My triangle burns.

  I have to get back to my friends at Prince Richard’s Maze.

  I have to get Anders and Marcy some clothes and Myers an eyepatch.

  I have to not feel like shit.

  As the wave subsides, I manage to bend down next to the three short steps that lead to a door into the house. Behind them is a little ledge, and on the ledge is a key. I’ve known the key has been there since forever. That’s one of those shared secrets between the four of us.

  Another is that Dr. Myers keeps vintage dirty magazines filled with girls dressed in skimpy nurse and cheerleader uniforms in his sock drawer underneath dozens of colored socks rolled into doughnuts; and Beryl always, always, always has pot in the cookie jar in our kitchen. I’d love to say that Anders’ mother has secrets too, but she’s way too much of an open book and that’s one novel that none of us want to read.

  I curl my fingers around the Coles’ house key, stand, and slip it into the lock. The door clicks. Seconds later I’m inside the lower level below the saucer-shaped second floor.

  11

  NORMALLY, ANYONE stepping into Marcy’s house would immediately freeze after one look around, strain to hear if a burglar is still creeping around in the upstairs space ship, then frantically scramble for their cell and call the police. Normal, however, isn’t exactly normal in Marcy’s house.

  Marcy’s parents are slobs. They don’t have tuna fish sandwiches hidden under the pillows in the lower-level rec room couch, or cat poop everywhere. They’re just messy like you wouldn’t expect adults to be messy. In the gloom of the Coles’ rec room I see piles of unfolded laundry, stacks of books, and Mr. Cole’s NordicTrack, which Mrs. Cole calls his coat rack. There are shirts hanging on it and a couple of boxes overflowing with papers and cardboard tubes leaning up against the underused equipment.

  Marcy’s goldfish, Tyrone, is floating in his goldfish-shaped bowl on a stone coffee table in front of a lumpy leather couch. The couch used to be upstairs but there are so many burn marks marring the leather, it now lives down here. The current version of Tyrone in his bowl has been around for about two years. There’s always been a Tyrone, but even Marcy knows that Tyrone the first, the second, and the third were all discretely flushed and replaced over the years in an elaborate scheme to ignore death.

  There are a few pictures of Marcy’s brother, Tate, on the wall, but not many. Tate’s absence is something else that Marcy’s family ignores. When asked, her parents say he’s away, instead of saying that he’s earned multiple stints up at the Buckland Retreat over the border in Vermont and is currently a long-term resident of The Bellingham School.

  In the middle of the room, surrounded by more boxes and bags, is a wrought iron spiral staircase that goes up to the second level. We all used to love running up and down those stairs when we were kids. Now, the stairs are just another place for the Coles to leave junk. Every third or fourth step has something on it.

  I take a deep breath. Somehow it seems like a monumental task to grab on to the banister and pull myself up the staircase. I grit my teeth and make the climb. Seconds later, I’m upstairs in the saucer of Marcy’s house, which is equally as messy as what lies beneath.

  The open concept layout is a little unnerving. There are no hallways to slink down, away from a mother who is so disinterested in you that even the act of slinking goes unnoticed. There is minimal furniture, though the mess fills the void left by a lack of seating, and there are windows everywhere.

  On the kitchen table, which is almost directly in front of me, is a huge pizza box, probably an extra-large from Rinaldo’s over on Meadowfield Street. I know Candy Rinaldo from school. She’s tiny, with little black eyes and a pointed chin. Myers says she looks like a ferret, but I secretly think that Myers gets a boner every time he sees her.

  After all, like his shirt implies, he is a master baiter.

  I casually walk over to the pizza box in the kitchen and lift the lid. There are a few cold pieces left and my stomach threatens to lurch again. I don’t know why, but I recall the recent taste of tomato sauce and mozzarella in my mouth.

  Was I here last night? I don’t know.

  Did I have pizza with Anders, Myers, and Marcy before everything faded to black? I don’t know. It’s far from likely, though. Pizza is on a long list of poisons I no longer allow to pass my lips.

  I close my eyes and try to remember, but doing so is about as futile as trying to make Mr. and Mrs. Cole keep a clean house. After a moment I shrug, turn left and walk halfway around the saucer, past an office and a bathroom, to Marcy’s bedroom. The door is cracked and I slip inside.

  I shake my head. Marcy’s room is exactly how I picture the child of a therapist’s bedroom to look. It’s a mecca of bizarre self-expression with psychedelic posters and slips of papers with weird sayings on them plastering the walls. Marcy likes to write things down and she likes to keep the words forever so she can always look back on them and remember. She also has half a dozen old oil paintings she did when we were all kids and took lessons from Mrs. Welling over near the shopping center. We all have the same bad masterpiece hanging on our walls—a wine bottle with a fat apple sitting next to it. There are stuffed animals everywhere. Marcy’s a sucker for stuffed animals. Sitting on a rocking chair is a giant panda that Anders won at Riverside Amusement Park last year. Marcy begged him for it, so he gave it to her.

  And all of it, all of it, is surrounded by a sea of laundry—and when I say a sea, I mean an ocean. Marcy’s entire bedroom floor, from one end to the other, is carpeted in clothing. There are bras and jeans and flouncy tops. There are shoes everywhere, and books from school, and a laptop floating in the middle of the chaos, its cord draped up and across her bureau and plugged into the wall.

  I don’t even know where to start.

  I mentally picture Marcy with her beautiful face and curly hair and try to imagi
ne what she wears. She has on a top already, but she might need another one. She’s wearing panties without any socks or shoes, but she might want another pair of panties and she needs something on her feet.

  “Damn,” I whisper under my breath. The truth is I don’t know what Marcy would want and it probably doesn’t matter anyway. I reach down and grab a pair of jeans, gingerly finger a pair of undies, and reach for a sweater that seems light enough for the weird weather we’ve been having. As I roll it all into a ball, I see a pair of shoes slowly sinking into the sea of clothing. I think I remember Marcy sometimes wearing them, so I grab those, too.

  As I silently turn in a circle, making sure I haven’t forgotten anything, a phone goes off and I jump.

  The receiver rings four times before Mrs. Cole’s business answering machine picks up.

  “Thank you for calling the offices of Dr. Darlene Cole,” echoes a calm smooth voice throughout the house. “If this is an emergency, please hang up and call 911. Otherwise, please leave your name, number, and the time you called, and I will be glad to get back to you as soon as I am able.”

  I wait for the beep then hear frantic chatter vomit into thin air.

  “Darlene, are you there? Darlene? Pick up the phone. Please. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe something like this is happening right here in Meadowfield.” I don’t recognize the voice on the other end of the line. I’m sure it’s one of Mrs. Cole’s clients. The woman sounds like she’s about to become unhinged and people who become unhinged are one of Marcy’s mother’s specialties.

  “Darlene, please,” begs the woman. “I don’t . . . I don’t know if I can handle this. Things like this don’t happen here. People don’t kill here. People don’t kill here and hide the bodies in their basements.” The woman on the other end sucks in a deep glut of air. “I can see them pulling them out in body bags right now. Christ, they’re right across the street from me. Oh God.” The woman starts crying again. Her sobs are so painful that it makes me hurt inside. Then she squeaks a little like she’s being squeezed really hard. “What if . . . what if my Sandy’s there? What if that . . . that man took Sandy and did horrible things to her?” Her words trail off and all I hear is bubbly sniffles and snot-filled snorts.

  Sandy.

  Sandy.

  Sandra Berman?

  Fuck me. What is she talking about? I take in a deep breath, dangerously close to how that woman is breathing into the answering machine.

  Sandra Berman ran away when we were fourteen. That was three years ago. I didn’t know her all that well but she seemed nice enough.

  One day she was there in the cafeteria at school, and the next she was gone.

  Sandra Berman ran away from home.

  Didn’t she?

  12

  HER HOUSE IS ON Covington Circle. No one I know has stepped inside it since Sandra Berman disappeared, so it doesn’t seem quite right to call the huge, white colonial with the faux southern columns Sandy’s house anymore.

  It’s the Berman house, or the house where that girl who ran away from home used to live.

  That house, with its pillars and in-ground swimming pool, sits on the other side of the dingle near the Meadowfield golf course. We used to laugh at that name—the dingle—when we were kids, but the swampy patch of forest that cuts through the center of town has always been called that.

  At this very moment, a woman who lives there is teetering on the edge of sanity as she watches police and firemen pull body bags out of a house across the street from her, and her daughter might be in one of them.

  Sandy.

  Sandra.

  Sandra Berman.

  Now I know why the alarms in town went off this morning. Now I know why there were sirens.

  Damn Myers and his obsessive imagination with aliens, government conspiracies, and all things creepy. If it weren’t for his incessant chatter, I wouldn’t know that body bags mean a murder house, and a murder house means someone super scary doing the murdering.

  Images of infamous killers—the worst of the worst—slosh around inside my skull even though they have no business being there. There’s that man out in Chicago who dressed like a clown even though he had a famous actor’s name. He lured dudes into his house, killed them, and buried them in his basement. What about the freak who injected household cleaning solutions into his victims’ brains to try and turn them into living zombies, but ended up eating them instead?

  I feel sick, but the serial killers keep coming.

  I remember hearing about the guy with the creepy eyes who made his followers cut up a pregnant lady back in the sixties. That one I know. Manson—like the musician who wears white contacts and eyeliner, but nothing like him at all. Manson’s still around. He keeps asking parole boards to set him free, and they thankfully keep saying no.

  Then there’s lampshade guy. His shades were made from skin taken from people.

  I shudder, but the Myers in my head won’t stop.

  Eileen Woronos. I only remember her because we talked about her murder spree in Contemporary History. Women aren’t supposed to be serial killers, but she was. David Berkowitz was, too. He told the police that a talking dog made him do it, and Ted something or other, who looked like a teacher or a coach, or someone you wouldn’t mind looking like yourself when you grow up, killed for the thrill of it all.

  Every few years a new murderer pops up right in the middle of the most unlikely of places, and now that place is Meadowfield. My perfect, prim, and oh so proper town has just had a Band-Aid ripped off a deep, ugly, festering wound right in its heart, and the thing underneath is unthinkable.

  As I stand motionless in the silence of Marcy’s house, the echo of Mrs. Berman’s frantic message and all that it implies still ringing in my ears, I momentarily forget about the growing horror around me, and instead, focus on the horror that is happening to me and my friends.

  We’ve experienced something truly terrifying, but now no one will even care because there is something bigger and badder descending on Meadowfield, and I’m starting to think that monsters are real.

  Seconds later, I am back in Marcy’s bedroom, fishing around her desk for her car keys. They are surprisingly easy to find considering nothing is easy to find in there. More seconds pass and I am down the spiral staircase, into the garage, and inside Marcy’s car. I reach above my head and press the garage door opener clipped to the visor, turn the key in the ignition, and start the engine.

  I don’t even realize that I am taking her car until I am backing down the driveway.

  It takes every ounce of effort I have not to palm the wheel of Marcy’s boat away from Primrose Lane, down Merriweather Drive, around the dingle, past Meadowfield Middle School with its dismal memories of Grafton Applewhite’s fat slurs, and head toward Covington Circle and the Berman house. I want to see. I have to see. Instead, I point Marcy’s car left and head back the way I walked this morning when I was even more confused than I am now.

  I drive slowly. My eyes dart from left to right. Somehow I expect corpses to be standing in the perfectly coiffed bushes in front of the perfectly coiffed homes, wrapped in white bags with zippers down the front of them, stained brown because truly terrifying blood is never red, it’s darker than that.

  I stifle the urge to turn on the radio. There might be something being broadcast about what is happening on Covington Circle. I’m not sure I want to hear about it yet. I have bigger, closer, more important things to worry about, and they start with a little triangle that is still burning on my left arm.

  I was branded last night with something white hot that is going to leave a permanent scar. Myers lost his eye. Marcy lost her pants. Anders lost a piece of himself and he may never find it again, and layered on top of it all is a new, fresh hell that eclipses ours. There is a gaping wound on the other side of the dingle that is only going
to grow larger and angrier with each body pulled out and onto the sunny grass underneath the October sun.

  Still, I need to think about my friends and what is happening to us. I can’t explain any of it, and if I can’t explain it, I might go bonkers.

  You know what happens to people who go bonkers?

  They think crazy thoughts.

  They do crazy things.

  They live in murder houses.

  13

  MYERS IS STANDING next to one of the two chained entries to Prince Richard’s Maze. This particular entrance isn’t on Meadowfield Street. It’s on Golden Road that runs alongside the woods and dead-ends overlooking the highway.

  Beryl’s cousin Myrna lives near the dead-end, but Myrna and Beryl don’t talk. Their feud has something to do with a nose job that happened when Myrna was sixteen, and my grandmother saying how she looked much better with it done.

  I guess that implied that she didn’t look good before. Thus, a verbal chasm opened up right in the middle of our family and has never closed.

  Myers is hugging himself. His stick arms and pointy shoulders make him look like puberty has passed him over and left him in a weird, primordial dwarf state but without the wizened face. My head is pounding as I maneuver Marcy’s car over to the side of the road and park.

  “Where have you been?” he cries as I open the door.

  “Dealing with your fuckity-fuck-fuck-fuck of a mother, among other things.”

  “She’s going to freakin’ murder me,” he sniffs and rubs his eye hole. “Did you get the patch?”

  “I got it. I got it,” I tell him as I rummage around in my backpack for the black eyepatch. “Here,” I say and hand him the crumpled bit of cloth.

  Myers hungrily snatches it out of my hand, much like a monkey would snatch a peanut from between my fingers at the Forest Park Zoo, and quickly positions the black oval over his nonexistent eye.