by James Newman
Hell, I would have enrolled in Basket-Weaving 101 if it got my old man off my back.
As much as I did not want to—I believed the time I wasted studying for classes my heart wasn’t even into could be better spent polishing up my first novel, in preparation for submitting it to potential agents—I did it to appease my parents. If I could just keep them happy until I received that first big publishing contract, I decided, everyone would win.
But then I took an unexpected detour on my road to success.
All my plans for the future were put on hold the moment I met Bridget Prescott.
***
I was headed back to the parking lot after paying my tuition in the main office when I spotted her. She sat on a bench outside the school library, her legs crossed demurely, her thighs barely covered (despite the season’s chill) in the shortest, sexiest miniskirt I had ever seen. She was lost in a book, oblivious to the chaos around her, to the din of students rushing back and forth across the campus courtyard.
Her hair was black as sin, so black it was almost blue, and it flowed all the way into her lap. It fell over her face as she sat there engrossed in her book, so all I could see of her features at first were her lips. They were full, red as rose petals. The kind of perfect, pouty lips you want to reach out and brush with your fingertips just to see if they’re real.
As I walked by her, I got a closer look at the title of the dog-eared paperback in her hands: ’Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King.
I couldn’t help but grin.
Was she a kindred soul, I wondered?
“Kick-ass book,” I said, slowing on the walkway to stand above her. “One of my personal faves.”
Normally, I would not have initiated conversation with a woman so drop-dead gorgeous if my life depended on it. Throughout high school, I’d had a reputation for being extremely shy, almost but not quite a wallflower. But something told me to go for it. That this was right. Meant to be.
I should have run screaming. Should have told that something to go straight to Hell.
She marked her place in the book with one finger, closed it. Looked up at me and returned my smile, shielding the most beautiful blue eyes I had ever seen from the sunlight with her free hand.
“I like it a lot so far,” she said.
“I just finished reading it for the third time,” I told her. “I can’t get enough of King’s work.”
“My favorite so far is Carrie,” she said.
“His first one? Great stuff.”
“Yeah. And DePalma’s movie kicked ass too. Sissy Spacek owned that role.”
I had to remind myself to close my mouth. Otherwise I might have stood there for the next few minutes with it hanging open, collecting flies. I couldn’t believe my ears…
Holy shit. She was a kindred soul! There was no turning back for me now.
Again she showed me a smile that made my heart flutter. But then, after a few more seconds, she brushed a lock of her raven hair behind her ear and gave me a look like she really wanted to get back to her book.
I quickly broke the silence between us by sticking my hand in her face.
Smooth…
“I’m sorry,” I said. “My name’s Andy, by the way. Andy Holland.”
“Hi, Andy,” she replied. “I’m Bridget.”
“You know… Bridget… if you like this kinda stuff, I oughta let you read the novel I’m working on sometime. I think you’d dig it.”
“You’re writing a book? Oh, now that’s cool.”
“I’m trying to, anyway. I started it in the tenth grade, but I’ve only been getting really serious about it for the last year or so.”
“What’s it called?”
“Wolf Moon.”
“I’d love to check that out,” she said. “What’s it about?”
“Werewolves.”
“Ooh… I think werewolves are sexy.”
“Hey,” I said, glancing off in the direction of the cafeteria. “If you don’t have anything better to do, what do you say we grab a cup of coffee or something?”
“Are you buying?” she asked.
“Of course.”
“Then I say that’s the best idea I’ve heard all day, Andy.”
I took her books, helped her to her feet.
And so it began.
***
We started dating pretty hot and heavy not long after that. For our first date, we caught a Saturday matinee of some cheesy monster flick I have long since forgotten. Later that same weekend, we rented Misery at the local video store, watched it while we snuggled up together on my parents’ sofa with a massive bowl of popcorn between us.
Throughout our burgeoning courtship I attended the classes in which I had enrolled, but sporadically. The majority of my time I devoted to my new girlfriend, much to Mom and Dad’s chagrin.
I should have known something was rotten in Denmark when I never saw Bridget on campus. On that first day we met, she had explained over her cup of coffee how she had also enrolled in some classes a few minutes before we crossed paths, but then in the weeks to come she claimed to have dropped most of them right after they began. Likewise, I should have known something smelled fishy when she made lame excuses any time I asked to meet her parents.
God, I was such a fool. I should have known nothing could be so perfect.
I never suspected that our entire relationship was a lie. That Bridget Prescott was a girl my friends and I—in another time, another place—would undoubtedly have labeled JAILBAIT.
***
We had been going out for nearly three months before we decided to take things a step further. With the exception of four or five awkward sessions of over-the-clothes petting in the backseat of my Mustang, we had not yet become intimate. Bridget admitted she was not a virgin, but she didn’t want me to think she was “easy.” Of course, I respected my girlfriend’s wish not to cross that line until the time was right. I assured her I would wait forever if that was what she wanted.
But I didn’t have to wait forever.
On the night of February 14, —, Valentine’s Day, Bridget claimed she was ready to give herself to me.
Her parents were supposed to be out of town for the next few days. She promised me in the days leading up to that fateful night that she would do things to me I had never before experienced. Something about a house full of candles, whipped cream and bubble baths and satin sheets and maybe even two sugar-cubes of liquid LSD if everything worked out as planned…
When all was said and done, she did get one thing right.
It turned out to be a night I would never forget.
***
For hours we explored each other’s bodies on her massive, canopied bed, like the last two lovers on a dying Earth with only that final evening left to spend together. I remember her CD changer was stocked with nothing but my favorite blues albums programmed for random play, as Bridget took me to heights of pleasure to which no other woman had ever taken me, before or since.
She had just climbed on top of me, and we were minutes away from climaxing together for the third time that night, when her father busted in on us.
No doubt, my mortified expression—my jaw dropping, my eyes growing wide as dinner plates as I gawked up from beneath my lover at the enormous figure suddenly filling the doorway—must have been one of the most comical sights in all recorded history. If it had happened to some other unfortunate bastard. Not me.
“What the fuck is going on here?” Bridget’s father bellowed, and his deep voice seemed to shake not only our candle-lit sanctum but the Prescotts’ entire two-story house as well.
“Oh,” was all I could say at first. “Oh… uhhh…”
Bridget wept as she rolled off of me, covered herself. “Daddy. I’m so embarrassed.”
“You’re a dead man,” Mr. Prescott promised me, as he stormed into the room.
And I believed him.
***
Before the night was over, Eldon Prescott put me in the hospital.
But he didn’t do it alone. He used a baseball bat, and enlisted two of Bridget’s older brothers to help him with the job.
When they were finished, they were courteous enough to call an ambulance for me. The two younger Prescott gentlemen hauled my broken body out onto the cold, dewy lawn for early-morning curbside service.
All told, I suffered a concussion, a broken nose, a fractured wrist, and two broken ribs. Not to mention innumerable bruises and lacerations.
Further adding insult to injury—in the truest sense of that cliché—I limped through the doors of Jackson County Memorial four days later to be confronted by a stern-faced police officer who glared at me as if I were the most disgusting piece of shit he had ever seen. When my father hurried off to the parking lot under the guise of pulling his station wagon around to the front of the hospital (later I realized Dad knew what was about to happen, and wished to spare me the humiliation of it happening in front of him), the cop ushered me into the back of his own vehicle instead, informing me that I was under arrest for statutory rape.
After everything that had happened, he was the first person to tell me why. He enlightened me to the fact that the girl of my dreams, Bridget Prescott, had only recently turned sixteen. I was four years her senior, and thus I had committed a felony sex crime in the state of Tennessee.
In the eyes of the law, I was no better than a child molester. A pedophile. No gray area existed where the legal system was concerned.
I saw Bridget one last time after that. Two weeks after my arrest, she stopped by my house. My mother reluctantly allowed her to enter our home only because she pleaded with Mom to let her apologize. She stayed for about ten minutes. The whole time she cried and cried, and she kept looking over her shoulder as if in fear that her father might show up any second to give me another taste of redneck justice. She explained through her tears that she had only lied to me about her age because I seemed like such an “honest, sincere” man, so much more mature than all the “silly little boys” who normally hit on her every day; I didn’t bother reminding her that this was probably because I was a man, and they were only boys. She did it because she believed in love at first sight, she said, and she was so sure she felt it when I had spoken to her over her battered copy of ’Salem’s Lot on the college campus that day. As for the reason she had been there to begin with, she explained that she had been waiting for her cousin to get out of class. She was a student at the high school just down the block, and her cousin had been her ride home after she missed the bus.
“I’m so sorry, Andy,” she sobbed. “This is all my fault. All I ask is… please don’t hate me.”
I didn’t let her know whether I hated her or not. God knows I wanted to. I wanted to loathe the ground she walked on.
But that’s what made it all the more difficult. I didn’t hate her. Quite the opposite, in fact.
“I’m sorry,” she said again, as she turned to leave at last.
“So am I,” I replied. It was the first time I had spoken since she stepped into my room. “I’m sorry I trusted you. I’m sorry your father and your two macho asshole brothers beat the living shit out of me.”
“Andy—”
“And I’m sorry I have to appear in court over something I never knew I was doing wrong. I’m sorry that, because you lied to me, Bridget, I have to stand in front of a judge and know everyone in that room is looking at me like I’m some kind of pervert. I’m sorry this is gonna be on my permanent record. You’re sorry? Yeah, well… I’m sorry too.”
***
The court date was two months later.
I pled guilty.
When it was all over, I was fined one thousand dollars, sentenced to a year’s probation, and I was ordered to stay away from Bridget Prescott.
It could have been much worse, the judge told me. But since I cooperated every step of the way, admitting what I had done, and considering my record had been spotless up till that point, he was as lenient upon me as the law allowed. Plus, I think the D.A. actually felt a tad sorry for me, after word got around that I had already received my comeuppance from the men in Bridget’s family.
***
I had served my probation, paid my fine. My wounds healed, eventually, along with my ego.
I never saw Bridget Prescott again.
A year or so after our ill-fated evening together, someone told me she ran off to Florida with a guy in his early thirties, but I never knew if that was true or not.
***
Now, almost twenty years later, I had all but forgotten about the mistake I had made when I was a young man. I could not recall the last time I had thought about Bridget Prescott.
But the media forced me to remember. They suddenly began to dredge it all up again, after I discovered Rebecca Lanning’s body.
They almost seemed to enjoy it… to thrive upon it…
I could not run from my past even if I tried, I soon discovered.
The good people of Poinsettia Lane would not let me.
CHAPTER TEN
From Saturday’s edition of the Harris City Tribune, Page 1:
POLICE SEARCH FOR KILLER “AROUND THE CLOCK”
Harris City Police continue to search for the murderer of nine-year-old Rebecca Faye Lanning, whose body was found on Poinsettia Lane two days ago.
According to police spokesperson Jo Lynn Hodges, State Medical Examiner Liam Futch is expected to conduct a post-mortem examination this weekend. Meanwhile, further circumstances surrounding the child’s death cannot be made public at this time, said Hodges.
Rebecca Lanning’s nude body was discovered by local writer Andrew Holland Thursday morning.
Holland, a resident of Harrison County, is the popular horror novelist who penned such provocative titles as Blood Dance, Brain Fever, Cannibal High, and Mortuary Smile. His most recent novel, Slow Burn—a gory tale about a serial killer priest who burns pregnant women alive because he believes they are possessed by demons—debuted last year at #7 on the New York Times Bestseller List.
Police records in his hometown of Jackson, Tennessee show that Andrew Holland was arrested for statutory rape in —, at the age of twenty. After pleading guilty to the charges against him, he was sentenced to one year’s probation.
The writer could not be reached for comment.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Sunday evening, after I had knocked out three or four thousand (very unpolished) words on A Feast of Souls, I went to lock up for the night. Normally I didn’t hit the sack until several hours later, but I figured a good night’s sleep would help recharge my batteries after everything that had happened, and with a little luck a marathon writing session might ensue in the days to come.
I hoped so, anyway. Time was running out.
As I moved through the foyer, approaching my screen door, I smelled the distant aroma of someone grilling hot dogs down the street. My mouth watered. Maybe I should do that for Sam when she comes over next Wednesday, I thought, fix burgers and dogs in the backyard. Yeah. It would be fun. She always did love a good cookout. Norman would undoubtedly enjoy it, too…
I had almost closed the front door, with my hand on the deadbolt, when something outside caught my eye.
Frowning, I eased open the door again, and peered out into the gathering dusk.
To my right, cattycorner across the street from me at 214 Poinsettia Lane, sat Floyd and Francine Beecham’s three-story Cape Cod. The house was dark, but beyond their teal Lincoln Town Car and the enormous Winnebago in their driveway I spotted the Beechams sitting on their front porch, chatting with another couple in the blue-gray twilight.
Muffled laughter. The faint hiss-pop of someone opening a can of soda or beer. A cough.
The way voices carry long distances in that calm period just before nightfall, it only took me a few seconds to recognize the other couple on the Beechams’ porch as the Pastoreks, from three houses down.
A metallic click. Ned Pastorek smoked a pipe now and then, and in the growing darkness I watche
d him light it. The thick black shadows on the porch briefly recoiled from the flickering orange glow of his Zippo. A minute or two later the sweet smell of tobacco wafted its way across the street to fill my nostrils.
A chill shot up my spine.
In that momentary flash of firelight, I could tell…
They were all looking my way.
They were talking about me.
I cursed myself for being paranoid. Or, at best, for being silly. Surely the two couples were just watching the last rays of the day’s setting sun disappearing on the horizon, through the gap between my property and the Sommersvilles’ next door. A temporary lull in their chitchat had occurred at the precise moment they gazed in my general direction. But it was nothing more sinister than that. Why would it be? This wasn’t a scene from one of my novels. These were people I saw every day. They weren’t body snatchers, aliens from outer space who had recently begun to show their true colors. No scheming quartet of serial killers lurked on the other side of the street. Ridiculous. My horror writer’s imagination had gotten the best of me. I might not have been particularly close to the Beechams or the Pastoreks, but to date I had not met anyone on Poinsettia Lane whom I could claim to truly dislike. And I certainly had no reason to fear them.
The longer I stood there, however… the more I heard… I wondered if all of that was about to change.
It had not been my imagination.