The land of dead flowers: (A serial killer thriller)

by Natasha A. Salnikova

  “How’s the book?”

  “Fine. In process.”

  Anna shook her head, finished her coffee, set the cup on top of the book pile, and then gasped and took it away. She shook off the cover even though there was nothing on it.

  “You’re head has been in the clouds before, but now … I understand, of course, a new genre and stuff.”

  “It’s more complicated than I anticipated. I haven’t formed the plot, but I’ll figure it out.”

  “No outline this time?”

  “No, I’m writing it differently this time.”

  She nodded.

  “So, how did you sleep? Did the house keep you awake?”

  “You know, I didn’t have the house dream. Sort of strange. Maybe I dreamed about it, but I don’t remember. I dreamed of a girl. She looked about six. She was six, yes.”

  “Hmm, a girl. Okay.”

  “I think … I think I’ve seen this girl before.”

  “It’s possible. As realists, we should believe that our dreams are the reflection of our daytime experience. Where could you have seen her?”

  “No idea. Actually, I think I know her. It’s a strange feeling. Maybe she’s one of our neighbors. I could have seen her in the building.”

  Anna shrugged, turned to her computer, typed something, read something, and typed again.

  “What are you doing?” Max asked.

  “Answers to comments in your guest book.”

  “Do they love me?”

  “Not everyone, but about ninety percent. More books is the most popular comment. I don’t answer that. Two people today asked if you would send books to their email addresses because they don’t have time to shop. Touching.”

  Max yawned, uninterested. In his first two years of publishing, he hung out on the Internet, forgetting about work. He collected reviews about his books, and networked on forums and blogs. Then Anna created a site for him, a forum attached to the site, and Max chatted there for hours. His interest started to fade, turning into boredom. He hadn’t been on the site in months, but Anna felt responsible and dedicated a lot of her free time to communication with his fans. She wanted him to be involved, or at least make his fans believe that he was involved. She answered questions, thanked the fans, changed old photos for new ones, and added new books and information. Max thought she even got some perverted pleasure pretending to be him. She especially liked the love letters from his female fans. She read them aloud to him and then read her answers.

  “Should I write about your new book?”

  Max scratched his chin. “No. Not yet. Let me write half, so that we have something to say.”

  “Yeah? Okay. Afraid to jinx it?”

  “No. I don’t want to start a buzz.”

  “Maybe let them get used to the thought.”

  “They’ll get used to it.”

  “Whatever you say, Cat. Okay, I’ve got to go.”

  “If you quit, you could stay home. With me.”

  Anna frowned, and then snorted. “Yeah, what a dream. The whole day with you. I won’t quit, ever!”

  “Oh. I guess I’ll have to pay more attention to the letters from my young fans.”

  “Do that and your tragic death will be in all the papers. How did you kill that actor in your book? Poleax?”

  “An electric fan fell into his bathtub.” Max swallowed and pressed his lips exaggeratedly, theatrically.

  “Yeah. These fans. They fall into water all the time, like crazy. Mostly in bathtubs when somebody is in there. Okay, Stevenson, I’m out. Don’t miss me.”

  Anna bent to her husband to kiss his lips, then smacked his shoulder, grabbed her bag from the floor, and went to the exit door.

  “That’s a form of domestic abuse!” Max yelled to her back.

  “I know! Put some ice on the wound!”

  Max waited for the door to slam shut before walking to the kitchen to make his breakfast. There he discovered toast on a plate and a jar with his favorite apricot jam. The coffee pot was full.

  “My kind, caring wife.”

  Max spread jam over the toast, poured coffee into his favorite cup, and put his breakfast on the table. Then he brought his laptop from the bedroom, deciding to work in the kitchen. The morning sun made this room the coziest in the apartment. Light blinds, light walls, smell of food and coffee.

  Biting the crunchy toast, drinking coffee, Max opened the file with the book, re-read the page with the description of the house, holding his gaze on the sentence about a blue dress from the attic. His mind produced a picture of a green dress, but Max changed that. He didn’t have to worry in this case, because the man said he didn’t have any dresses in his attic. Or maybe he had one, but forgot. Maybe something left from his mother. Only how had Max known about it?

  “I didn’t. It’s my mind at work. I can’t control it.”

  If he told Anna about it, she would think it was some kind of deadly disease. She wasn’t extremely valetudinarian, but she always worried about him. She was especially worried about any changes or strange feelings in his head. Her friend had died from brain cancer when she was young, and now any hint of dizziness or an ache that disappeared after a couple of Tylenol made her nervous. She immediately thought the worst.

  If my mother had cared about me this much, Max thought again, remembering his unhappy childhood. His alcoholic father and his mother, looking for love on the side.

  Finishing his toast, drinking his coffee, and reading over the page again, Max thought about the girl from his dream. It seemed that he didn’t just know her, but he had known her for a long time. He knew that she enjoyed walking with her mother by the river and playing with her dog. She had lots of dolls, but her favorite toy was a stuffed bear. It was white with one brown spot on its neck.

  Max moved the empty cup to the side and settled on the chair more comfortably.

  A girl named Sunny lived in this house. Of course, Sunny had parents, but they’d never been at home. Her grandmother took care of her. She lived with them. She and her dog, Hopper.

  Max stopped for a moment.

  No one could miss Sunny when she walked down the street. Her hair, the color of warm honey, glowed in the sun. She turned heads even when she was young.

  Max wiped his hands on his pants. Sunny was his protagonist. Somehow he didn’t see her coming out of the house where Morris lived, but that would be easy to change. She was going to live in that house.

  When he made this decision, Max understood that even though it would be easy to do, he would feel uncomfortable. Why? He couldn’t explain the feeling. This house didn’t fit that girl as Cinderella’s shoe didn’t fit her sister. She didn’t belong to that house. It rejected her. Actually, the opposite. She didn’t want to be there.

  With these thoughts, Max decided to get more coffee. Or maybe he should get something calming instead. He had enough energy, and if his hands weren’t shaking yet, he felt close. Never before had his characters protested against a living place. Yes, they acted against a created outline. Or maybe not they, but he had a new idea during the writing process and the plot took another turn, because it seemed more interesting and intriguing. This time everything was different. The girl dictated the rules to him; she developed the book—not he. This girl. The one he didn’t know before last night, before she invaded his dreams and claimed his mind. The feeling covered him like an avalanche covering a small village in the mountains.

  He was losing control over his thoughts.

  Max moved away from the computer, bent his head down, pushing his hands against the table, and drew in a deep breath. Then another. A character owning the writer’s mind was a myth. It was a myth for romantics who believed in the magic power of the muse. He was a workhorse. His muse must woke up at nine and fell asleep when he desired. His muse wasn’t notable for capriciousness, but was obedient like a cobra, dancing under a flute.

  “I said you’ll live there,” Max said out loud and laughed, hearing his words. “Talking to my c
haracters. Good start for the first phase of schizophrenia.”

  Max went to the living room and pulled a volume of Crime and Punishment from the shelf. He read it as a distraction from time to time. He opened the book to a random page and read the first line at the top. Then again. Then two more times before he realized the meaning escaped him. He could see the letters, but he couldn’t comprehend the words. They went blurry in front of his eyes, and among them, he saw the face of the lovely child. With brown eyes and freckles.

  “I’m here.”

  Max threw the book on the floor, but picked it up right away. The voice didn’t come from the book; it was in his head. Loud, confident, childish.

  Maybe Anna was right.

  “It’s not exactly normal. Maybe completely abnormal. Or … I imagined it. Because … I’m talking to myself again … Because I sunk too deeply into this book. That’s right. Nothing’s wrong. It’s going to be my best book yet.”

  Max returned Dostoyevsky to the shelf and went back to the kitchen. It seemed that his fingers tingled with the desire to write. The words now crowded his head. Now he knew what to write and how. He didn’t have doubts. He sat at the computer, deleted the two first chapters, keeping only the part with descriptions of the girl, and disappeared into another life. The girl named Sunny lived with her mother and her grandmother. Her father visited her on weekends because her mother had divorced him. The girl loved to play and walk by the river. She dreamed about a brother or a sister, but her mother said it couldn’t happen unless she married a second time. The girl loved her father too much, and she hoped that he and her mom would make up and he would come back to live with them.

  When she stayed home alone, she played with her dog or her teddy bear, read to them, or told them stories she wrote herself. The girl loved to make up fairy tales and her mother called her a writer. Also, the girl loved to dream. She dreamed about far away countries with palm trees and the ocean, and hoped to live there one day. When she grew up.

  CHAPTER 17

  After work, Anna stopped at the store. The fridge was almost empty, and Max, as usual, probably spent the whole day in front of the computer and didn’t think to pick up groceries. He loved to eat out; she enjoyed staying home for dinner. She preferred quiet time with her husband rather than waiting for him to sign a book or shoot a picture with a fan.

  Did he visit the house again today? she wondered.

  Anna went between the rows, flinging fresh fruits and vegetables into the cart. Then she had to go to the meat aisle and refrigerated food section, so she could stick something in the microwave and eat without spending time at the stove. She would rather spend her time at the computer or talking to her lovely hubby instead of cooking.

  She passed shelves with books and magazines, noticing that only two of Max’s books were available for sale. Not good. They were out and the store hadn’t hurried to replenish the stock. She grabbed People magazine and the new Sandford novel from the Prey series. She liked Sandford’s characters, but thought Max was better with style and plot. She enjoyed reading other writers’ mysteries and thrillers while waiting for another masterpiece from her husband. She didn’t even know this time when the next masterpiece would be finished.

  Anna returned to the produce department to get strawberries for smoothies. She picked up a plastic box and studied it critically from all sides, spotting rotten berries. She found a good one and threw it into the cart on top of bags of apples, cucumbers, and tomatoes. She then went to get fish, returning her thoughts to her husband and his new idea.

  She wasn’t worried about the book, but Max’s behavior seemed atypical. He was always in some stage of dreaming, but she usually could snap him out of his thoughts easily. He would return to reality and realized where he was and what was going on. Now, she had to call him three times and loudly to make him wake up. Even then, he still gazed at her through a cloud of images only he could see, until his eyes cleared after a few seconds. This wasn’t what concerned her though. Anna was used to living with a writer, and the moodiness and confusion applied to the profession. Now he worked on the book in a new genre, so his actions weren’t that surprising. But these repetitive dreams, which were rooted in reality, and the dizziness (she was sure there’d been more incidents that he didn’t mention because he didn’t want her to take him to the doctor) made her anxious.

  He didn’t tell her because he didn’t want her to worry and it was the same reason she didn’t ask questions, so he wouldn’t understand how his condition affected her. Condition? Was it a condition? What was it? Of course, he was a creative person, same as she, and people with their characteristics had above average sensitivity to all kinds of events. Wherever he saw that house, whatever had happened there, was imprinted on Max’s mind with a hot iron. Maybe he couldn’t remember it consciously, but it couldn’t be different.

  Anna did not seriously believe it was something supernatural. She believed in some paranormal things: ghosts, magic, but she couldn’t accept it in connection to her friends or family. Some kind of trust-mistrust. Max would laugh at her if she took it seriously. He was a realist. Anna couldn’t be more amazed.

  “Now a girl,” she mumbled, looking at the box of cereal. She never kept the same route in the store, crossing it diagonally more often than walking from aisle to aisle.

  The box went to the cart, topping a mountain of groceries. Anna stood in one place for a minute, trying to remember what else she wanted, and went to the register with a decision that she had enough for today. She liked to shop, but couldn’t stay in the store for hours.

  “Okay. Don’t think about anything supernatural.” She lowered her head and kept walking.

  “Why don’t you go with Max to that house?” Anna thought, joining the end of the line. What if she had seen it too and could remember where? Yes, that was the proposal she had to offer. It would be great to spend a day, one day, with her husband in the middle of a workweek. Sink into something mysterious, talk about the book. He always loved to talk about his books, but not this time. Yes, many things were different this time.

  “Ma’am!”

  Anna shuddered and looked at the girl at the register, studying her with curiosity.

  “Did you change your mind about the groceries?”

  Anna stared into her cart then back at the girl, swimming out of her thoughts. She smiled, reaching for the cereal box. She transferred the purchases from the cart to the counter, making a decision to ask Max about taking her to Watervliet. It would be fun.

  CHAPTER 18

  “Are you going to that house again?” Anna asked after she returned from the bathroom to the bedroom. Max lay under the blanket already, his eyes closed in the aftermath of their lovemaking.

  “I don’t know,” he said without opening them. “Maybe tomorrow. Don’t know.”

  “I want to go with you.”

  Max looked at her as she crawled under the blanket. “Why?”

  “I want to get into your dream.” Anna rose onto her arm, gazing at her husband. “Maybe I’ll remember it. I could have seen it also, right? I’ll call in sick tomorrow.”

  “It’s far.”

  “We’re not going to walk there.”

  “Yes, but … Maybe I won’t go tomorrow. I want to work tomorrow.”

  Anna sat up and pulled her knees to her chest. “Why are you wriggling?”

  “Who’s wriggling? I’m wriggling?” Max laughed, but she knew him too well to not see he was pretending he could care less. “I’m not wriggling.”

  “When you act like this, what else am I supposed to think?”

  “Don’t think anything.” Max stood from the bed, slid into his underwear, and went to the bathroom.

  “Where are you going?” Anna asked.

  “Bathroom and kitchen. Should I bring you water?”

  “No, thank you.” Anna lay down and pulled the blanket up to her chin. She felt cold radiating from her husband. What had she said? She just asked him to take her with hi
m. It wasn’t the first time. She escorted him to signings, joined him for dinner meetings, or visited places with him that he wanted to see to describe in his books. It didn’t happen often because most of the information he grabbed from the Internet, but it happened. What was it about this house? Was it his personal possession and he didn’t want other people to get involved? Even his wife? What if?

  The thoughts made her hot, and Anna threw off the blanket. Now she needed water, preferably iced.

  What if there was no house? What if it was an excuse, some made up story to justify his absence from the house for long periods of time and his confused state of mind? What if?

  She watched Max when he entered the room and climbed in the bed, not looking at her, turning the light off on his side.

  “Are you going to read?”

  “No.” Anna reached for her light and pressed the button. The room fell into darkness.

  She trusted her husband, always had, and she had never thought, even for a second, that he could have an affair. But why not? They’d been together for four years. He was a famous and a handsome man. He turned women’s heads when they went out. Why did she believe that he wouldn’t be tempted? Why wouldn’t physical attraction overpower love? Why wouldn’t he fall in love with someone else? For example, with a woman who could give him a child?

  Her heart pounded. Anna turned to Max and looked at his calm face, illuminated by the soft light of the streetlamps. His eyes closed, features relaxed. She was always a panicker, and it wasn’t her strong suit to look at things rationally. Maybe she should get a hold of herself. He’d never smelled of strange perfume, he hadn’t called her different names during sex, and he stayed home in the evenings and nights. He didn’t smell of alcohol or receive weird calls. He just didn’t want to take her with him to some small town to show her an old house from his dreams. It was nothing. He probably just didn’t understand yet what was going on with his story.

  It was a rational explanation.