by James Newman
We began to make love, anyway, until our good buddy Norman came looking for us.
Just as we found our rhythm, our bodies merging as one, the retriever’s worried bark filled the night. So loud was his call, he woke Sam right away. We heard our daughter crying for us from the back porch of the cabin, and before we had a chance to compose ourselves Norman leapt out of the darkness, his sloppy wet tongue attacking our sweaty limbs with an urgency that could only have been borne from extreme jealousy. Like a big, ornery kid demanding every bit of our attention.
No matter how hard we tried, we were unable to stay angry with him. We laughed and laughed, wrapped ourselves in that dirty blanket and—our faces flush with embarrassment—we quickly followed Norman back to the cabin. Samantha’s tiny arms were crossed, I remember, and one foot tapped impatiently as she watched us emerge from the pitch-black night.
“God, I miss him,” I said into the phone now. “I miss him so bad.”
Karen did not reply.
Another long minute of silence passed between us. I stared at the crayon drawing Samantha had given me two months ago, that homemade HAPPY FATHER’S DAY card attached to the refrigerator door by teddy-bear magnets. Stick figure effigies of myself and Sam and a big brown Norman frolicked without a care in the world beneath an enormous bright yellow sun.
My vision grew blurry with tears until I could no longer see the picture at all.
I sniffled softly. Karen followed suit.
A few seconds later, in the background, I heard Jason Burke say something to my ex-wife that I couldn’t quite make out.
“You gotta go?” I said.
“Jason wants to, um, drive over to Pet World. He hasn’t told her yet, but he’s thinking about letting Sam pick out a puppy.”
I didn’t have the energy left in me to get pissed off about that. In some strange way, I even respected Jason for it. Despite the fact that my best friend’s corpse was barely even cold.
“I guess I should get going,” Karen said.
“I understand.”
“We’re probably going up to the lake again in a day or two, but I’ll have my cell-phone with me. Promise you’ll call if you need me?”
“I will,” I said.
“I’m serious, Andy. I’m worried about you.”
“Okay.”
“Please keep me updated?”
“Okay.”
“Take care of yourself.”
“I’ll try.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The evening was quiet, serene. Dusk had just begun to wrap its long gray arms around my property.
“What are you burying there, Andy?” Ben Souther called out to me as I huffed and puffed and salty sweat burned in my eyes.
I turned to see Ben peeking over the privacy fence separating our properties. The fence stood seven feet tall, but Ben kept a small stepladder on his side that he ascended any time we chatted back and forth while working in our respective backyards. As always, my next-door neighbor’s eyes were hidden behind his purple-tinted glasses—in fact, the brim of a floppy straw hat obscured the entire top half of his face on the evening in question—yet I could tell he was staring at the tarp-covered form on the ground behind me.
At first, I did not reply. I just returned to my task without saying a word. A few feet away, Norman’s doghouse lay on its side, empty and abandoned forever. Something about that depressed me even more than the shrouded, buzzing bulk at my feet. Never again would Norman curl up inside his miniature Bates Manor while he chewed on a plump chicken bone or drifted off into lazy canine slumber on a sunny afternoon.
I hadn’t decided yet what I planned to do with the doghouse, but where it had once sat in the far corner of my yard I now dug a hole in which to inter the retriever’s body. Before me, the results of my labor resembled a gaping brown wound in Mother Nature’s lush green flesh.
The ground was soft, still slightly muddy from yesterday’s rain, but that did not make my job any easier.
“Andy,” Ben said again.
I stopped digging, sighed. “What is it, Ben? I’m busy here.”
“Sorry to interrupt. I was just wondering what it is you’re burying there.”
My grip on the shovel’s handle grew tighter. Splinters dug into my callused palms.
Ben said, “That’s not… who I think it is—?”
His curious expression could not have been more fake. He knew. Whether he had played a part in Norman’s murder or not, he knew goddamn well what lay beneath the tarp.
I wanted to take my shovel to his head, knock that stupid fucking straw hat off and watch it go flying. I wanted to see his skull collapse beneath my wrath, consequences be damned.
Instead, I said, “It’s my dog.”
“Oh, man,” Ben said. “Man, that’s rough.”
“Someone poisoned him.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Wouldn’t joke about something like that, Ben.”
A cold breeze made the hair on my arms stand up. It caused the tarp covering Norman’s corpse to billow slightly. I imagined its invisible fingers caressing the retriever’s death-matted fur, tickling his floppy golden ears.
Ben continued to stare toward the shape on the lawn, as if he could not tear his eyes away from it. It infuriated me. This was a personal matter, a private good-bye between my best friend and me. I did not want anyone else to see this. My beloved pet’s makeshift funeral was none of Ben Souther’s fucking business, and Norman deserved so much more.
“For Christ’s sake,” I said. “Would you like me to lift up the tarp and show you, so you can see for yourself it’s really Norman under there?”
He frowned, shifted his weight from one foot to the other atop his little stepladder. “Whatever do you mean, Andy?”
“You know exactly what I mean, Ben. So you can tell all your friends”—I tilted my head in the direction of the street, toward the other houses on Poinsettia Lane—“that it’s not something else I’m burying in my backyard.”
Silence between us. Another strong breeze sighed through the treetops a few feet away. A dog barked in the distance.
For a second or two, I wondered if Ben was about to take me up on my offer. If he might jump across the fence to inspect the figure under the tarp for himself.
Finally, though, his face fell.
“Norman was a good dog,” he said. “I always liked him.”
“Me too,” I said.
“I’m sorry, Andy. If I knew who did it, I’d tell you. I think you deserve that, at least.”
“Would you, Ben?” I said. “Would you tell me?”
“Of course.”
“I’d like to believe that,” I said. “And I might have. Once upon a time.”
“You should ask Officer Keith to look into this for you. He’ll get to the bottom of it, I’m sure.”
I guffawed loudly, in spite of myself. “ ‘Officer Keith.’ Right.”
With that, I threw myself into my work anew, started digging like a madman. My shovel chuffed into the earth again and again and again. Harder, louder, faster. I wanted this over. Done with. Now.
As strenuously as I worked, however, I felt as if I moved in slow motion beneath my neighbor’s unending scrutiny.
“ ‘What is a man,’ ” Ben said softly, a few minutes later, “ ‘but a miserable little pile of secrets.’ ”
Once again I stopped digging, turned to my neighbor with eyes full of hate.
“What?”
“Andre Malraux,” he enlightened me.
This time I dropped my shovel. It made a soft pooting sound on the mound of dirt beside Norman’s grave. When I took several steps toward Ben, his face grew pale. He wobbled atop his stepladder, as if preparing to make a run for home.
“Ben,” I said. “How long have you known me now? Five, six years?”
“That sounds about right.”
“I'm not a killer.”
“Never said you were.”
I shook my he
ad. I didn’t know what else to say. I just stood there staring at him.
“Man can hide a lot of secrets in five or six years, though,” Ben said. “You can’t blame folks for being suspicious. These are suspicious times, Andy. If you could step outside yourself, you’d see how it looks. What you did when you were young, and those books you write…”
He trailed off, as if he didn’t quite know how to finish his point. And then, the look Ben gave me during the next moment filled me with a sense of déjà vu the likes of which I had never felt before. It was so strong it gave me goosebumps…
When I was a child, I idolized my maternal grandfather. He was my role model, my hero. He was also extremely religious. Shortly after the publication of my first novel, I gave my grandfather a copy of that book. It had been such an honor to hand it to him, as he had always assured me that I could grow up to be anything I wanted to be as long as I worked hard at it. My greatest dream back then was to make my grandfather proud. At first, it appeared I had succeeded. He beamed from ear to ear as he asked me to sign it for him, said he couldn’t wait to read it. He told all his friends about it, and the fellow members of his Seventh Day Adventist church. But one week later, he handed the book back to me. He claimed he had tried to read it, but after discovering that my novel was filled with “such flagrant ungodliness” he could never accept my gift in good conscience. I’ll never forget the look on my grandfather’s face as he told me this. It was an expression of sheer disappointment, as if he had lost so much respect for me. Respect I could never earn back.
It was that same look of not-so-subtle condescension and disappointment that darkened Ben Souther’s face now as he peered over my privacy fence, watching me bury my best friend. An expression of loss, almost. Hurt. As if he were the one who had suffered so much these past few days. As if I had brought all of this upon myself, and in the process Ben had lost a damned good friend who turned out to be anything but good and very damned indeed.
I stared at the pink evening sky.
I felt tired. So tired.
I reached for my shovel again.
“I’m a writer, Ben,” I said. “That’s all. I am just a writer.”
I realized I had started crying. Tears of both grief and anger burned in my eyes. They trickled down my face and dripped into the mud at my feet.
Ben said, “But you write about death. The occult. In your stories people are always hurting other people. Usually the innocent.”
“Have you ever read any of my books?” I asked him. “Or are you just talking out of your ass?”
“Touché.”
“Besides, that’s what they do, isn’t it? Every day. People hurt other people.”
“Mm,” Ben said. “Unfortunately, you are right…”
He paused, as if for effect.
“But then: ‘Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.’ ”
I glared at him.
For once, he did not identify the source of his quotation.
Fueled by wrath, I threw myself into my work more vigorously than ever. My shovel stabbed into the earth like a knife gouging into the flesh of my enemies. I stood upon its blade, forcing it deeper, deeper. Digging faster and faster. My breaths burst out of me in harsh, labored grunts, and I began slinging the dirt from Norman’s grave haphazardly over my shoulder. I was no longer aiming for the mound a few feet away.
“I guess you’ve never heard about what happened to the Beechams,” Ben said. “Hard to believe, but you must be one of the only folks around here who doesn’t know…”
I did not respond. I just kept digging. As if my life depended on it.
“If nothing else, maybe it’ll help put things into perspective for you. Maybe then you’ll understand that there’s more to this tragedy than you think. Folks aren’t just picking on you, Andy. They’re not just looking for a scapegoat. They’re searching for justice.”
Still, I continued digging.
“Thirty years ago, Floyd and his wife had a daughter. Their only child. Her name was Carolyn. This was when they lived up in Philly, long before I ever knew them. Carolyn was six, I believe, the last time they saw her. She was abducted at the mall while the Beechams were Christmas shopping.”
I paused. Tried not to let Ben know that he had struck a nerve. Wondered if, in his own way, he was trying to tell me who had poisoned my dog.
I quickly went back to digging.
“They never found her, Andy. It was as if their little girl just vanished without a trace. All these years, the Beechams have never known what happened to their daughter. Floyd told me it damn near drove Frannie crazy.”
Finally, I stopped. I stared at him.
He stared back.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. And I meant it.
Ben said, “None of us can imagine what those poor people went through. You can’t unless you’ve been there. Unless you’ve walked in their shoes.”
“I’m sure Rebecca Lanning’s murder brought back a lot of terrible memories for the Beechams,” I said. “And you’re right. That does explain a lot. But let me tell you something, Ben…”
“Yeah?”
“I just want you to know, and you should spread the word to your buddies… if I catch any of them on my property again, I don’t care who it is… I swear to God I’ll kill them.”
Ben gasped. “What a horrible thing to say.”
“I mean it.”
“Bad times in our neighborhood, son. I don’t know if I’d go around saying stuff like that. Might not help your situation much, you get my drift.”
Behind him, the crackle and buzz of an electric bug zapper on Ben’s rear patio punctuated his warning as its lethal blue glow claimed a victim.
I shook my head, gnashed my teeth so hard I heard them squeaking in my skull, and returned to my digging once again. Because I knew if I gazed upon Ben Souther for another second I would no longer be able to restrain myself from leaping over the fence and strangling him with my bare hands.
About the time I finished, when I tossed my shovel aside and reached for the tarp to commence with the most difficult part of my task, the older man cleared his throat.
“I have always liked you, Andy,” he said softly. “So I just want to warn you…”
I bent over Norman’s corpse, did not look at Ben as I growled, “Warn me about what?”
“Maybe you should just leave. That might be best. Before things get even worse.”
A chill shot up my spine. My best friend’s vinyl burial shroud slid from my grasp with a rubbery squeak.
“Are you threatening me? How dare you—”
“No. No. Not at all. I’m just giving you a friendly bit of advice, man to man…”
In the twilight, my neighbor’s dark glasses resembled two wide black holes in his face. Like twin gunshot wounds to his skull.
“Cut your losses, Andy. Pack up your things and go.”
At last, he turned and descended his stepladder. However, his parting words seemed to linger on the evening air like a foul stench long after Ben disappeared from sight.
“Get out while you still can. Before you end up dead, just like your mutt.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
That night, I dreamed I was digging another grave.
But this time I buried my daughter.
The site of her interment was the Clinton property, down the street. All around me, wide yellow CRIME SCENE: DO NOT CROSS streamers snapped and popped in a chilly breeze while I worked. The night was starless, moonless. Blacker than the Devil’s soul.
I didn’t wake up screaming until shortly after the pink Bugs Bunny beach towel covering my little girl’s corpse slid away, and she sat up with a sound like autumn leaves crackling underfoot.
She was naked.
She turned to me, opened her eyes.
She had no pupils. Just two blank, unholy orbs that burned a bright, bright green. The same color as the poison that killed my golden retriever.
�
��Why did you let Norman die?” said the nightmare Samantha-thing, beckoning to me with mottled gray arms too long and skinny to be her own. “Daddy, what did you dooooo?”
In the distance, a dog barked. It was an angry, accusing sound… yet eerily distorted, like a scratchy old record playing in reverse.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Three days later—mere seconds after I had finished gobbling down a tuna salad sandwich and a glass of flat Dr Pepper for dinner—my cell phone rang.
I considered letting it go straight to voice-mail, but I knew I would never forgive myself if I found out later that Sam had tried to call me.
I wasn’t thinking straight. My mind barely registered the words “UNKNOWN NUMBER” on the little screen. As I carried my dirty dishes to the kitchen sink, I punched a button and grumbled into the phone, “Hello.”
“Andrew Holland.” A man’s voice. Low, muffled. As if he were covering the receiver with something so I could not identify him.
It worked. I detected a slight Southern accent, but nothing more.
“Speaking,” I said. “Who is this?”
“You’re fucked, Holland. It won’t be long at all now…”
“Excuse me? Who—”
“Might wanna turn on the TV. Your book-writin’ ass is finished.”
My breath caught in my throat. “What? I don’t understa—”