by C I Dennis
“This is like being in prison,” my mother said.
“There’s a police car down the street, between here and your house,” I said. “You’ll be safe. They’ll get the guy.”
“I don’t know how you could do this, Vincent,” my mother said. “Putting your family in danger.”
“Mom—” I began, but it was no use. She was right. My head began to throb. “I’m going to lie down for a while.”
*
I’m not a nap-taker, even on the occasions when Royal has completely worn me out and I really need one. I was in Mrs. Tomaselli’s spare bedroom, lying on top of an old-fashioned full bed with my feet extending over the end. My mind was on two things: how I had stupidly put my family at risk all over again by stirring up Tomas Schultheiss, and how I’d been conned by a beautiful woman. I had somehow believed that Yuliana was attracted to me, but she had been working. She was still a honey trap. Brooks had no doubt assigned her to me, and I’d fallen for it. The guy liked to hedge his bets, all right.
She’d left the lights on at the hotel in Montreal and had captured us in flagrante delicto with her smartphone. The video must have been Brooks’ insurance policy against me misbehaving. Granted, she’d softened later, on the night she was drunk, in my mother’s house. She had confessed that she was supposed to be keeping an eye on me, and in the same confession she’d said that she wasn’t supposed to be “feeling like this”. Like what? Maybe she really had loved me. Or maybe she was just one of Brooks Burleigh’s very convincing high-class hookers. Either way, she was dead.
I got a beer from Mrs. Tomaselli’s refrigerator and popped it open. It was a Bud Light—not what I’d usually choose, but I wanted a beer, or perhaps several. I thought of how I’d lectured Carla about smoking pot, and winced. The girls were still at the card table, and were still pretending I wasn’t there.
“I’m going out for some air,” I told them. I downed the whole can of beer, tossed it in the trash and put on my jacket. Maybe I’d hit the bars and stagger home after dark like Jimmy Tanzi used to.
*
The Hope Cemetery is about a quarter mile out of Barre on the East Montpelier Road. The layout is the product of careful planning, and unlike other cemeteries, every stone is fashioned from Barre Gray granite, giving the place a sense of uniformity. The sameness ends there, as it has a wild variety of headstones displaying the pinnacle of the stonecutter’s art. Some of them represented the deceased’s hobby: a racing car, a soccer ball, even a life-sized easy chair. One was a bizarre double bed with profiles of the husband and wife in relief, rising from the bedcovers in their pajamas. I had parked near the road and passed Giuseppe Donati’s stone as I walked in, which was an eerie relief carving of a soldier smoking a cigarette, with the face of his wife floating in the smoke. It was nearly dark, and I was alone, although there were several sets of tire tracks in the snow from earlier visitors. The holiday weekend was a good opportunity for relatives from out of town to come visit their loved ones’ graves.
I found them, all the way in the back where the newer stones were. Theirs were plain, old-fashioned tablets; just two simple granite slabs, side-by-side like twin dominoes. Brooks’ was to the right, and Yuliana’s was to the left. They were set close to each other as if they had been married, and Yuliana’s said “Burleigh” instead of her unpronounceable last name. I took off my hat. I could feel the sting of the November chill, especially on the side of my head where the bullet wound had now scarred over.
I was here to say goodbye. But I didn’t know how to say it. The beer had calmed me down, and despite what I’d seen on her phone, I realized that Yuliana had loved me in her way, and I had loved her back in my way. She may have been doing her job, but it had changed somewhere along the line, and it had felt real. It wasn’t a love like Barbara’s or Glory’s—we had hardly known each other—but it had been much more than a fling. Possibly, to be brutally honest with myself, it had seemed like more because I was getting old, and she was young and beautiful—and I’d let myself get sucked into a classic midlife crisis just like all the philandering spouses I had followed around Florida as a P.I. Reaching my fiftieth year seemed to herald the beginning of my disintegration. Little pieces of me were falling off—at the dentist’s, or the dermatologist’s, or on the operating room floor—and people were dying, or were fading out of my life. I could barely talk, or walk, or shoot. I examined the cold granite slabs and imagined myself lying underneath one of my own, in the not-so-distant future.
“Goodbye,” I said to the faceless gray stone.
“Goodbye,” a voice said, behind me.
I turned around. Tomas Schultheiss stood facing me in his long black overcoat and leather gloves. His arm was outstretched, and in his hand was a matte-black Smith and Wesson automatic, pointed at my head.
“Mr. Broadbent,” I said.
“He’s no longer viable, thanks to you,” he said. “You’ve cost me far too much. I never should have let you live. I thought the last shot had rendered you harmless.”
His dark, bushy eyebrows almost looked comic, like a Groucho disguise. “You should get your money back from whoever did the plastic surgery.”
“Very funny,” he said.
“How did you find me?”
He held up a small black box. I recognized it. It was the tracker that I’d put on his Audi, ten months ago. He must have attached it to my Subaru before he’d gone up his driveway this morning in Enosburg Falls.
“When I’m done with you, I’m going to kill your family,” he said. “Just so you know.”
I lunged at him, but he sidestepped me and hit me on the head with his pistol. The blow landed on the same side where the bullet had, and everything went white. I fell onto my back, next to Yuliana’s stone, struggling to stay conscious. I saw him approach and hold the gun out. He was going to shoot me where I lay.
A shot rang out in the cold, and the sound echoed and groaned among the mausoleums and gravestones like the cracking of ice on a frozen lake. The back of Tomas Schultheiss’ head turned red and he fell over on top of me, his chest against mine in a grisly embrace, soaking me in his blood.
It took all my strength to push his lifeless body off of me and sit up in the snow. A woman stood twenty feet away, and was slowly lowering my father’s old shotgun.
“It works,” she said. She was dressed in a black leather coat that contrasted with her short blonde hair. She had had surgery too, but the effect was much nicer than Tomas’.
“You knew I was here?”
“Mrs. Tomaselli. She lent me the gun.”
“And you knew that Tomas—”
“Jenny told me. He dumped her for a younger one. She still lived with him, but she hated him.”
“Quite the network,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “I don’t exist anymore, but I still have contacts.”
I rose to my feet, trying to shake off the effect of the blow to the head. I was dizzy, and the white light was still clouding my vision. Yuliana Burleigh was standing in front of me. Or not. She was dead—as dead as my father—but she was alive.
“So…how—” I started.
“I never got on the plane,” she said. “Ed told me to take his car. I was going to disappear. I did, until Jenny called me today and told me that Tomas was going to kill you. I found out where you were from your girlfriend.”
“Barbara?”
“Mrs. Tomaselli,” she said. “We were in touch when you were in the hospital. She was my inside source. She’s the type that can keep a secret.”
“Mrs. Tomaselli sent me out here. She said I needed to say goodbye.”
“She’s right.”
“Yuliana, I…” I desperately wanted to take her in my arms. But she was standing just out of my reach.
“We can’t,” she said.
“I know.”
She handed me the shotgun. “Cover my tracks, Vince,” she said. “You saved me, and now I saved you.”
“Please,” I said, but I didn’t k
now what to say next.
“Just say goodbye,” she said, and she turned away. Away from me, and from her own gravestone.
SUNDAY
Royal had howled the whole ride to the Burlington airport, and Barbara’s and my nerves were on edge. It’s a primitive way of telling your parents that you need something—a fresh diaper, sleep, breast milk, the toy you dropped—and it works. We should all communicate so effectively, but we’d probably all kill each other first.
We had our second airport send-off of the year, and once again my mother, Mrs. Tomaselli, Carla, Rod, Junie, and both Pallmeister and Patton were there. It was good to have some help with the bags and gear, though I would still have to heft most of it myself through security and take it on the plane.
Everybody promised to visit us in Florida, and we promised to be back. Barbara had fallen in love with Vermont and, on the ride to the airport in the rare moments that Royal wasn’t crying, had been lobbying me to move us north permanently. It had been less than twenty-four hours since Tomas Schultheiss had nearly killed me in the cemetery, and I told her we would discuss it, but I was in no shape to make any life decisions. I wanted to be sitting in a lawn chair in my back yard in Vero, drinking something cold, shooting the breeze with Roberto, and bouncing my little guy on my lap. One thing I did tell her was that we would return, and we wouldn’t wait a whole year until the next Thanksgiving. I had grown closer to my brother and sister, and I felt like I had a true friend and a kindred spirit in Robert Patton.
He had commandeered a wheelchair again, but I refused. The Vinny Shuffle had gotten worse after I’d taken a hit on the head from Schultheiss’ gun, but I didn’t want to see any more wheelchairs until I was at least ninety.
“You sure?” he said.
“I’m sure,” I said. “It starts with the wheelchair, then the shuffleboard, and then you take sixteen different pills every morning before bingo, and you’re in bed by six.”
“Jeez,” he said. “I was going to retire to Florida someday, but I’m suddenly having second thoughts.”
“You’d like it,” I said. “I’ll take you dike-jumping.”
“I’m not even going to ask what that is,” he said.
“I’m retired, by the way,” I said.
“Seriously?”
“Yes. I promised Barbara, last night. I can’t put them at risk anymore.”
“All of us think about that,” he said. “Good for you.”
I shook his hand, and Pallmeister’s, and then hugged Junie, my sister, Rod, my mother, and last of all, Mrs. Tomaselli. “Thanks,” I said, as we embraced. “Not just for saving my life. I think you might have saved my marriage, too.”
“For the time being,” she said. “You’ll need to keep on saving it. Things come up.”
“Love you, Mrs. T,” I said.
“Oh! My Vinny, you said it!” she said. “I’ve died and gone to heaven!” She fanned her face with a magazine.
I led my family to the security line, where we undressed, were irradiated, and then dressed again. Nobody offered to check Royal’s diaper for explosives. Thirty minutes later we were above Lake Champlain with Royal asleep on the cushion between us—we had miraculously scored an unoccupied seat.
Barbara was reading a magazine, and she put it down. “What are you thinking about, Vince?”
I had been looking out the window at the lake below. I was not thinking about Yuliana Burleigh. The gray stone slab had told the world that she was dead. I knew she was alive, but more to the point, my family was alive. We had survived.
“Nursery school,” I said. “There’s a good one in Vero, but we’d better sign up now.”
Barbara laughed and went back to her magazine, and I watched my son’s tiny nostrils move in and out as he slept.
Acknowledgements
I would like to extend my thanks and appreciation to several people for their help.
Hats off to Joni Cole and Deb Heimann for their superb critical and editorial skills—you two are the best.
Special thanks to Bob and Heidi Recupero, early readers who provided me with some devious twists, and also to Andrew Kerth, Meleta Kardos, Isabel Dennis, Sara Dennis, Dr. Betsy Jaffee, and Lt. Terry Lewis of the Vermont State Police for their valuable advice, encouragement and reality checks.
Thanks also to my son Alexander Dennis—a.k.a.EPROM—for his creative and beautiful artwork.
About the Author
C.I. Dennis lives in Vermont and New Hampshire with his family and dogs.
More by C.I. Dennis: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/210915