by Newman,James
I awoke on the floor a few hours later, though it felt like only seconds had passed since I drifted off. Apparently I had rolled out of Dan’s bed in my sleep. My head throbbed, and a tingling pins-and-needles sensation ran through my elbow. I must have hit my funny bone on the frame of the bed on the way down.
I laughed at myself. Besides feeling stupid for falling out of the bed, the pins-and-needles tingling in my arms was one of those pains that for some reason you can’t help but chuckle over, even as you grit your teeth and wish it would go away. A pain that almost tickles in some weird way.
“If my big brother could see me now,” I groaned.
I prepared to stand, and that’s when I saw the cigar box under Dan’s bed. About two feet back. It had been shoved up against the rosewood body of an acoustic guitar Dan hadn’t touched in years, and was surrounded by a wrinkled red tank-top that had been kicked under there and forgotten, a hardcover copy of a book called The Deep (“A NEW NOVEL BY THE AUTHOR OF JAWS!”), an old eight-track tape of The Who’s Tommy, and a fuzzy herd of dust bunnies.
The cigar box was old, its once-bright colors faded and its corners scuffed. There was something about it that seemed to beckon to me, though I did not know why.
I couldn’t help myself. My curiosity got the best of me once again…
I slid the cigar box out from beneath my brother’s bed. PRIMO DEL REY, read the logo on its lid.
Lightning flickered at the window. Thunder vibrated through the foundations of my home. I could feel it in my butt as I sat there Indian-style beside Dan’s bed.
I stood, set the box up on Dan’s mattress. Sure, I felt a tad guilty at this invasion of my big brother’s privacy, knew what I was doing wasn’t really right, but I rationalized my actions by telling myself that Dan wouldn’t mind. We were more than just brothers. We were best friends. We had nothing to hide from each other. Ever.
I expected to find a few dollar bills inside the box, some loose change. Maybe a couple old arrowheads Dan had collected during his own boyhood adventures around Midnight. I had a few of those myself in a shoebox under my bed, and I wouldn’t have sold them for all the money in the world. Perhaps, I thought, I might find a key or two inside there as well—the kind that turns up and you can’t remember for the life of you what that key opens so you hold on to it forever just in case you do ever need it.
I certainly did not expect to find anything too terribly exciting.
But then, I was young and naïve.
I rose, plopped down on the edge of Dan’s bed. Opened the box. As soon as the lid fell back, the undeniable aroma of women’s perfume wafted up into my nostrils. It wasn’t overwhelming, that smell, but it was there nonetheless. And it was strong. Inside the box.
I felt the tickly threat of a sneeze coming on, like a wave threatening to break in my skull, but it never came. I licked my lips, shifted my weight uncomfortably upon the bed. The smell of a female, especially a flowery aroma so potent and alive as the one which escaped from that old cigar box despite having been sealed up inside there for God knows how long…it made me feel funny down below in a way I could not explain at the age of twelve.
That is not to say that I did not like it, of course. I did. That perfume smell immediately brought to mind every tiny crush I ever had, every girl who ever smiled at me in gym class or sat beside me in Vacation Bible School. For the record, I never went through that female-hating stage most grammar school boys wear on their sleeves like some prepubescent badge of honor, and I think even if I had I would have dropped it like an ugly jacket I was glad to outgrow the second that glorious woman-smell met my nostrils…
I was hooked. I had to know what was in that box now, even if it killed me…
The first thing I saw when I opened it was a worn paperback copy of The Hobbit. Beneath that lay a dog-eared ticket from the Kiss concert Dan had gone to see with a bunch of his high school friends shortly after graduation. Also hidden in there were two slips of yellow notebook paper scribbled with what I assumed were girls’ phone numbers (“KIM,” said one, “BECCA” the other). I frowned when I saw those, wondered what his steady girlfriend Julie would have thought about such souvenirs. Underneath the girls’ phone numbers lay an unused postcard from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and an imitation-leather key-chain with the Ford logo on it. But that wasn’t all. As I thumbed through these items, placing each upon the bed before me as if taking a detailed inventory of Dan’s private property, a cigarette rolled into one corner of the box. That made me frown. Far as I know, my brother had never been a smoker. I picked the cigarette up, sniffed it. Scrunched up my nose. It sure didn’t smell like any cigarette I’d ever seen. It had no markings, and almost looked homemade.
Then, at the bottom of the box, beneath everything else my brother had chosen to hang onto for whatever reason, I saw the neat square pile of pink notebook paper.
The pages were all undersized, as if torn from a colorful legal pad. There were three or four of them, all stacked together beneath the Hobbit book and the Kiss tickets and the key-chain and the funny-smelling cigarette.
I realized instantly that those pages were the source of that strong perfume aroma. I could almost taste it.
The first thing I noticed about them was the purple ink used to write those notes to my brother. Upon each hot pink page were several short paragraphs written in what looked like a girl’s neat handwriting. She wrote in a style that could not seem to decide whether it wanted to be cursive or print, but alternated between both, and she liked to dot her every “i” with a cute little valentine.
The second thing I noticed, as I gave those pages a precursory glance, skimming over them without really reading any of the letters’ content yet…was the signature at the bottom of each.
They had all been signed C.B.R.
CASSIE.
Or a variation on that name and those initials.
The room grew cold.
“D-Dan?” I stammered. “I d-don’t…what is this?”
I stared off into nothing for a minute, trying to make sense of what I had just found. I was confused. In a daze. The storm lapped at the window a few feet away from me like the slimy wet tongue of a pervert.
My hands trembled slightly as I started with the page at the top of the stack, reading it aloud to myself in a low, uneven whisper:
Dear Danny,
i enjoyed talking to you Saturday night. Although i’ll bet it would have been better for both of us if your girlfriend hadn’t been there (haha).
Just kidding. She seems pretty cool, I guess. what was her name again?
i would like to give you my phone number, if you wouldn’t think bad of me. Just remember—if my daddy answers don’t worry. his bark is a whole lot worse than his bite.
i can’t wait to hear from you, Danny.
Please call me i’ll be waiting
Hugs and Kisses,
CASSIE
555-4845
I swallowed a lump in my throat that felt approximately the size of one of my brother’s basketballs. My heart slammed in my chest.
I shook my head back and forth, unable to comprehend this new development before me.
It couldn’t be. No way.
What the hell did this mean?
I didn’t want to read on. But I did. I held my breath as I picked up the second pink letter, no longer wanting to smell that heady perfume aroma which permeated each page like the scent of one very flirtatious ghost:
Danny,
i can’t stop thinking about our night together. i miss you so bad. Every minute i am without you hurts so bad i want to DIE.
God…what did you DO to me?
You made me feel so special, Danny. i want to see you again soon.
You are so sexy. My hunky basketball star.
Love,
C.B.R.
I couldn’t stop shaking my head.
This wasn’t right.
“How…what…?”
Dan knew her?
I
felt dirty, didn’t understand any of it, yet at the same time I did. So much more than I wanted to.
Everything I thought I knew, everything I believed, suddenly seemed like only one possibility. If not a dirty lie altogether.
I grew light-headed as I perused the third love letter to my brother, and with every passing second a terrible taste—like the taste of a dead girl’s rotting flesh—filled my mouth and caused my bowels to lurch:
Danny…my love:
i know you’re worried about my age, but that shouldn’t matter to you now. What’s done is done, right?
Heck, Mom and Dad don’t even know you exist.
Sometimes you have to look at the big picture. Think about it this way…our ages wouldn’t mean a thing if you were 30 and I was 27, now would it?
think about that
AGE IS JUST A NUMBER!
It hurts when you ignore me, Danny. i gave you something special, and now you want to act like i’m nobody.
i thought you were different than all the other boys. I thought it meant something more with us. Something REAL.
You’re not a boy, Danny. You are a MAN.
MY man.
Is it HER? If it’s Julie, maybe you should get rid of her. If you do it now, i’m sure she’ll understand…but if she finds out about us from someone else, it’s going to be a lot harder for everyone involved, don’t you think?
i don’t know what I’m trying to say. i probably sound like an idiot. All I know is…I think I love you, Danny.
Can you feel it too? Don’t lie.
What can SHE give you that i can’t?
C.B.R.
I read that one again, and as I did so my vision grew blurry. I felt a headache coming on.
None of it made any sense.
The last letter I had pulled from the cigar box, however, was the one that I am quite sure made my heart stop for several long seconds. My body had grown numb from the neck down and the room started spinning around me by the time I got to the end of it:
SCREW YOU, DAN, if you can’t be a MAN and do the RIGHT THING!!!
IT TAKES TWO TO TANGO, YOU KNOW.
Wait till people see you’re not the MR. PERFECT they all thought you were!!!!!!!!!!!!
you’re just like all the rest you make me SICK.
C.
What the hell was going on here? My head swam. I felt ill. The room seemed to spin around me. I gripped the edge of the bed to keep from rolling off of it again.
I couldn’t believe the implications of those letters…
Why had Dan neglected to tell me that he knew Cassie Rourke, the night I confided in him what I had witnessed in the Snake River Woods?
Was it possible that my big brother—the one person whom I loved and trusted unconditionally, whom I thought I would love and trust unconditionally till the very end of time—might have had something to hide?
No. It couldn’t be. I would not allow myself to consider such a thing. I felt ashamed that such terrible thoughts could even enter my mind.
The possibility of something like that being true…my God, it would have killed me.
I could not deny, however, what I saw with my own eyes.
Dan had known Cassie Belle Rourke. And her letters to him hinted that they had been much more than just friends, once upon a time.
The thing that bothered me most of all, however…the thing that made me want to run screaming into the midnight rain, never to return lest I should learn the horrible truth about what happened between my brother and that girl who was brutally murdered the night of the Apple Gala…was the fact that those last two letters suggested a relationship turned sour.
I could almost feel the animosity burning off the last page, radiating from Cassie Rourke’s words like lavender fire.
What had happened between them? What had my brother done?
I didn’t know.
I could no longer be sure about anything at all in my world.
And that is why…as the storm beat madly against the sides of my house and my brain swirled with a million conflicting emotions and the cloying smell of Cassie Belle Rourke’s perfume seemed to grow stronger and stronger the longer her letters lay on the bed before me until it might have filled the whole room…I leaned over the side of Danny’s bed like a man on a rapidly sinking ship…
And I threw up all over his bedroom floor.
AUGUST 17
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
School was scheduled to begin in just four days, but as the storm throughout Midnight loomed with no visible end in sight—not only the literal barrage of constant thunder and lightning, I mean, but also the chaos surrounding the search for Calvin Mooney—rumors ran rampant throughout my hometown that the first day of school might be delayed for a week or two. Normally, as with the cancellation of school due to snow several times each winter, this would have been the greatest news ever to a kid who would rather stay at home and do nothing all day than sit behind a desk and listen to some crotchety old teacher drone on about chlorophyll, long division, and dangling participles. For once, however, the news of the school year’s possible postponement was no cause for celebration. To me it simply meant, during those dark days following the Apple Gala, there would be no homework or good friends or even bullies like my grammar-school archenemy Craig Stoody to take my mind off the far more sinister matters that had tortured me so mercilessly of late.
I was stuck at home with my doubts and fears and mistrust of everyone and everything I had once held so dear.
The rain continued, on and on, as if intentionally mirroring my foul mood. It pummeled my home like a giant hammer, and everywhere I looked dirty gray water ran down the streets of Midnight like precious lifeblood leaking from a thousand different cuts the storm had opened in the places I once loved. A growing number of Midnight’s side roads were blocked by bright orange sawhorses and detour signs, hastily-constructed barriers warning of flooded routes which had become, in effect, lesser tributaries of the Snake River. A number of electrical wires and phone lines had been severed by the storm, and they lay atop the asphalt here and there throughout town like so many black snakes ready to strike at unsuspecting citizens. At any given time we could all expect our power to flash off and on, sometimes remaining interrupted for up to a day or more.
Midnight itself seemed stuck in a constant state of gray back then, the town’s very atmosphere one of gloom and despondency.
It was like a disease.
A disease that had infected us all.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Even now, so many years later, I don’t know what got into me that morning. Perhaps I was simply in such a foul, antagonistic mood toward everyone and everything around me, I grew blinded by my burning desire for quick, easy vindication.
I wanted to lash out at somebody—needed to lash out at something.
I had called Deputy Linder already, and I told him what I saw. Dan assured me Burner was safe, and I had seen the evidence for myself out back. Yet those were very small victories when all was said and done. There were still other matters which ate constantly at my brain like a nasty black worm devouring all reason and common sense…
Someone had to pay for the fact that my brother had known Cassie Rourke. Someone had to suffer in the same way I had suffered since discovering that my mother was involved with a beast who committed murder then blamed it on a poor handicapped man.
I was young. I was foolish. I was pissed off. Thinking clearly had become a foreign concept to me, and even my fear at last took a backseat to the hatred I felt for Cassandra Rourke’s killer after those most recent developments.
That is why, just a few minutes after Mom left for work, I called Sheriff Burt Baker myself.
And I told him what I saw, out there in the Snake River Woods.
****
Mom headed off to work that day around six a.m. I heard her getting ready, singing softly to herself in her bedroom as I lay in my own bed listening to the radio.
I waited
until I heard her station wagon pull out of the driveway and rumble on down the street before I got up and went into the kitchen.
On the table beside an empty bowl and a box of Corn Flakes I found a note she had left for me. It explained how she’d gone in to work early so she could “milk a little Over-Time”; otherwise she was afraid “the next time the power goes out it might just stay out, ’cause it sure ain’t free.”
I shrugged, yawned, but then frowned when I saw the post-script at the bottom: “P.S. Burt says hello. You really should get to know him, honey, ’cause I think you guys would get along GREAT.”
I shook my head. Made a sound that was half-exasperated groan/half-animal growl. I clenched my fists, hated the note even more for that exaggerated “GREAT” with which she had ended it, in all capital letters.
I felt more than GREAT as I crumpled up her piece-of-shit note and tossed it toward the wastebasket in the far corner of the kitchen. I missed, but I didn’t pick it up. I left it lying in the middle of the floor like a small white turd expelled on Mom’s spotless linoleum by a constipated gremlin.
Then I saw his number, on the wall beside the phone, an amendment to Mom’s little “emergency list” slightly above and to the right of the contact information for our family physician, Dr. Laymon:
BURT
555-8405
My stomach lurched when I saw it. She had drawn a fat, swirling heart around the killer’s name with a red Magic Marker. Like a naïve, lovesick little schoolgirl defiling her personal belongings with odes to short-lived puppy love.
I stood there for a minute, staring at his name. Waiting for my nausea to subside. I asked God to forgive me for the thoughts filling my head. I did not want to hate my mother, but I found it harder and harder to fight such feelings the more I learned about her.