Murder House

by Jordan Castillo Price

  I was nearly done unpacking the second crate of books when a sharp rap on the door startled me out of my purposeful (but mind-numbing) task. Somehow, I would’ve pegged it for Sylvester Hale’s knock, even if I didn’t see his cloaked silhouette through the frosted glass. There was something sharp, insistent, and pointedly annoyed about it.

  I straightened up, sore hips protesting, and ran a hand through my slightly sweaty hair, which fortunately was still gooped from last night. “Apologies are awesome opportunities to interact,” Bly had told me. “Just do it in character. Your guy would probably come up with a real doozy, an apology that’s not really an apology.”

  With that in mind, I tamped down my natural urge to launch into an anxious explanation as to how a weeping Terri-Anne made me late, and instead opened the door with a pointedly casual, “What’s up?”

  Hale stood on my stoop in his caped winter coat, a natty fedora, and a bright purple shoulder bag. He crossed his arms primly and said, “Well, you’ve already woken me up slamming things around your living room. You might as well invite me in.”

  Success! Except that Bly wasn’t there to read him. Dammit. I waved him into the living room and said, “Is that a new purse?”

  Hale arched a pointy gray eyebrow at me. “You’ve got the most peculiar sense of humor, my boy. Hard to tell if you’re being cunning or stupid.”

  “You know what they say….” I trailed off, since there was no particular axiom I was trying to evoke, other than a change of subject.

  “Since I have the great fortune to share a wall with one of the most scathing critics of queer gender politics today, I figured I would see about joining you for a few writing sprints.”

  I looked at him blankly.

  “I promise I won’t copy,” he added with a sweet little smile that led me to believe he was being sarcastic…or at least trying to be.

  “Ha ha,” I said dryly. Could I get away with asking what a writing sprint might be? Probably not. Instead, I said, “I’m not really a morning writer.”

  Apparently, that sounded plausible. “And yet, it can be so liberating to challenge our preconceived ideas of our own capabilities, and engage the Muse outside our typical creative peaks.”

  I held his purse awkwardly while he removed his cloak and hat and hung it in the entryway, then handed it back to him before he got any ideas about perusing my book collection. Because it probably said something about me—something other than the fact that I was simply relieved I didn’t have to crack any of those boring covers. Hale went straight through to the dining room table and pulled out a surprisingly modern laptop. “I’m thinking it’s time to start my memoirs.”

  I should probably have an opinion about that. I tried to make it dickish. “I can’t recall the last time I’ve paid any attention to a memoir.”

  That answer seemed to excite him. “Precisely. They’re so gauche and self-serving, who even thinks to pen them anymore, other than politicians or reality stars trying to make a fast ghostwritten buck?”

  As I was wondering where the term ghostwriting initiated, Hale said, “But the question is, do I begin with my scandalous two-year affair with the mayor’s son, or the first time I donned my mother’s costume jewelry?”

  “Everyone loves a good scandal,” I said.

  “You’re right,” he sighed. “It’s terribly obvious.”

  Bly had told me that people often hear a lot less of what you actually say to them than you might think. I’d presumed he said that to bolster my confidence, since he could feel how nervous I was about needing to improvise around so many opinionated strangers. But maybe there was a grain of truth to his reassurance. I poured a cup of coffee for both Hale and me, pulled out my own laptop and set myself up across from him. And while he did a bunch of preparatory neck rolls and finger stretches, I quietly looked up the term writing sprints. Which meant pretty much what you’d expect.

  Hale glanced at his watch. “We’ll start with ten minutes. That should be ample time to get the wheels turning.”

  Hopefully I could make it look like I was writing for ten minutes. “Fine.”

  “And…begin.”

  Gentle clacking noises started coming from Hale’s keyboard almost immediately. He was a touch typist, not a two-fingered wonder like me. What if my typing style gave me away? Was it crazy of me to embark on this fake persona without so much as a typing lesson?

  We’d soon see.

  I pulled open my email and sent a quick, panicked note to Bly. Hale is here, can you come home?

  His email must’ve been set to ping his phone alerts. Before I could even figure out how to open up a word processor, I got the reply, I’m at least an hour away. Stall him.

  According to the web, people usually did more than one writing sprint, so if I could just sit there and make some plausible clacky sounds, maybe Bly would be home by the time we finished. But pretending to type was a lot harder than actually typing. I kept overthinking it and worrying it sounded fake. Especially since I’d probably exposed whatever subtle rhythms my actual typing might have when I was sending that message to Bly. And so I stuck my cursor on the blank page and I rambled.

  Before I knew it, the ten minutes were up.

  “Well,” Hale said, “that’s a start. What’s your word count?”

  I hadn’t the faintest idea where to find that particular tidbit of information—one that my persona would most definitely know. “It’s not the quantity that counts,” I said douchily.

  “Three hundred and eight words,” he announced, then looked at me meaningfully. We’d already established I wasn’t about to share mine, so what did he want now? It took me a second, but when I said, “Care to share?” He seemed pleased. Oh, he made a show of grousing and saying he wasn’t ready, but, come on. Why bother writing with someone if you’re not going to rub their nose in it afterward?

  Hale fixed his gaze on the computer, cleared his throat importantly, and read.

  “Most men, when faced with the unwelcome knowledge of their own difference—labeled aberrant, and deviant, and perverse—would quail at the thought of exposing their deepest thoughts to the cruel mercies of our ignorant society.

  “I am not most men.”

  He read the rest, then looked at me expectantly.

  “That’s really something,” I said.

  “I know it’s rough. But it does have some potential.” He tipped down his chin, looked at me over his bifocals, and said, “Well? Go ahead.”

  Wait, what? “Oh no,” I said quickly. “I couldn’t.”

  “Come now, I’m sure you haven’t gotten as far as you have in your career if you can’t handle a little critique.”

  The good thing about playing an insufferable hipster is the fact that if I said or did anything out of character, I could always claim I was being ironic. And so, in the spirit of keeping Hale there until Bly got back, I read.

  “Once upon a time if you told doctors you heard voices, they’d diagnose you as schizophrenic, put you on heavy drugs, and lock you away in a cozy state institution to keep you from hurting yourself or others. Nowadays, they test you first to see if you’re psychic.”

  I hadn’t actually meant to start writing a memoir. I was just killing time while I waited for the clock to tick down. No doubt I’d seen and done a few things that would make for some interesting reading. But how could I possibly write anything coherent when I only remembered a small fragment of my life?

  “Starting with the world’s most facile cliché?” Hale observed. “Once upon a time? That takes quite a sturdy ego.”

  I figured that meant I was doing a pretty good job pretending to be a pretentious little shit. “It’s not set in stone,” I said. “Ready for round two?”

  “Just one moment. I’m not done unpacking your opening gambit. What, precisely, do you posit? That Psych has as much to do with psychiatric maladies as it does psychic abilities?”

  Douchebag probably wouldn’t want him to define the word posit. Or facile,
for that matter. “Make of it what you will,” I said with a confidence I most definitely did not feel.

  “Is your argument for causation or correlation?”

  Crap. “What do you think?”

  “Well. The DSM certainly had its most major revision after the Ganzfeld Experiment. Then again, that piece of rubbish classified homosexuality as a pathology well into the seventies.”

  Bad enough he wanted to argue about my opening line. Now he was throwing language, history and psychology at me, all in one conversation. Luckily, I had an arsenal of conversation sallies up my sleeve from my tradecraft readings. “I see where you’re going with this.”

  It was a phrase designed to both agree with someone and encourage them to elaborate on their stance so you can figure out what the hell they’re talking about. I couldn’t have deployed it at a more opportune moment.

  Which was why I was totally baffled that Hale took offense.

  “It’s bad enough I must endure shop clerks and waitresses talking down to me. But from someone like you—someone who’s well-acquainted with confirmation bias—this dismissive attitude of yours reeks of condescension. I may be old enough to be your grandfather, but rest assured, my faculties are as sharp as they ever were. And I might not be a Northwestern graduate, but I’ve augmented my humble education with more years of experience than you’ve lived.”

  The closest I’d been to Northwestern was collaring some of their frat boys scoring crack over by Juneway Terrace. I’m not sure which was worse. Having to act like I’d gone to some fancy college, or knowing my subject had been freaking researching me.

  The information age cut both ways. The FPMP might be able to plant a background about a new identity that could be accessed by anyone with an internet connection. Instant past, without anyone even having to leave the office. But that also left me wide open to scrutiny from people who used words like posit.

  Hale said, “Why do you presume I’m being a ridiculous old man?”

  According to the tradecraft, sometimes the best answer was a question. “And why do you presume I’m talking down to you? I’m sure you won’t be shocked to find out I generally come off as an asshole.”

  Initially, it looked as if my declaration might just piss him off more. But then he gave a ruefully weary headshake. “Just my type. If only I were twenty years younger….”

  It was a truce, of sorts, though not an easy one. He closed his laptop and shoved it in his purse—with Bly still at least forty-five minutes away.

  “I thought we were sprinting,” I said.

  “I’ve forgotten how exhausting it is to banter with fellow writers. Nay, you cannot dissuade me from my retreat. My morning quota for interaction is satisfied…and my rump is already sore from your appallingly rigid furniture.”

  How did other people get me to stick around when I sorely wanted to leave? Terri-Anne did it with food. But I had nothing but prepackaged dietetic meals on hand. And given that he barely took a sip of the coffee I’d put in front of him, I couldn’t tempt him with caffeine either.

  Guilt was another promising avenue. But I would need more time to formulate a plausible complaint, and Hale was already halfway to the front door.

  My head might’ve been crammed full of all the tradecraft articles I’d been consuming, but I had a few tricks up my sleeve from my previous life, too. If Jacob wanted to make a point, he had no qualms about playing fast and loose with the facts, and especially backing them up with completely fabricated data. “You’ve seen the new study on writing productivity, haven’t you? Daily accountability is super important. If you’re serious about your memoir, we’ll need to make this a standing date.”

  Hale paused with one arm in the sleeve of his elaborate overcoat. “Not only caustic, but presumptuous, too.” He shook his head. “You’ll be the death of me, indeed.”

  Was that good? Hard to say. I tailed him outside—damn, it was cold enough to freeze off my hair goop—and said, “Give me your phone number. I’ll send you a text.”

  “It’s adorable that you think I’d abide the obtrusiveness of a cellular phone,” he called back over his shoulder.

  “Same time tomorrow?” I ventured. But Hale’s front door was already closing behind him with a very final-sounding thump.

  I pulled out my obtrusive cellular phone and shot my fake husband a text.

  Never mind…I blew it.

  19

  For the first time in my very short career as a psychic spy, I gave some serious consideration to quitting. Not because I had qualms about spying on someone, but because I realized how mightily I sucked at it.

  That crack Hale made about our furniture being uncomfortable wasn’t wrong. Hell bent on making sure he actually stayed a while the next time he came over, I struck out for the local froufrou shops and bought some new seat cushions. Not gonna lie, I got a kick out of using my FPMP credit card to pad our hard wooden dining room chairs. Would it be weird to go knock on his door and invite him over to see them? Probably. And with my luck, he’d think I was succumbing to the half-joking “if only I were twenty years younger” spiel. I might not be all that smooth, but I can tell when another guy wouldn’t say no to a hand-job.

  Still, the sooner I sealed the deal on the dinner invite, the sooner I’d be back on my own furniture. I tromped around the snowbank to Hale’s front door and rang the bell. Numerous times. But eventually I decided that he probably wasn’t home—plus, the longer I stood there in plain view, the greater my chance of being lured into a dessert by Terri-Anne.

  I spent the rest of the day lurking around See You Latte with one eye on the door. And I tried not to read anything into the fact that Hale regularly spent hours in the cafe, even though the chairs weren’t any more comfortable here than they were in my fake dining room.

  I debated the wisdom of an eighth cup of coffee and lined up yet again for the counter. I was considering whether or not I should supplement my impending dinner with a turkey panini when I spotted a flyer that looked vaguely familiar. Faldstool Fridays. I had no idea what a faldstool might be, so I asked my phone, which claimed it was a folding chair. Which made me even more suspicious about the claim that my furniture wasn’t good enough for Hale’s delicate octogenarian ass. But the event was starting in just a few minutes—and that Cleghorn guy had mentioned that Hale might be there.

  I shot Bly a text. Our guy might be at Twice Told Tales. Can you make it?

  A quick reply. On my way.

  It was something Jacob might say. Which left me staring at my phone with a weird ache in my middle and the sense of feeling phenomenally alone.

  “Are you gonna order?” someone snapped. I turned to find a ruddy-faced guy glaring at me, and quelled the impulse to tell him to pipe down and keep his pants on. That was something an ex-cop would do, not a stay-at-home douchebag—who’d likely prefer to skulk back to his computer and write a scathing, anonymous Amazon review of something completely unrelated instead. I swallowed my pride and waved him ahead, then trudged out into the snow toward the used book store.

  It was late. It was February. And it was dark. Twice Told Tales looked even more cramped and dusty inside without daylight filtering in through the smudged windows. And now the meager floorspace was taken up by a dozen mismatched, crooked chairs. A sideboard featured boxed wine, paper cups, and a plate of cheese cubes that were already going hard around the edges.

  A few intrepid souls had come out to see the author read—a dull-looking history of gay Chicago by yet another middle-aged white guy. His photo beamed from an awkward-looking publicity shot mounted on an easel beside the podium, and just a few feet away, the author himself was speaking very earnestly with the store owner. I noted the guy was not carrying a bag.

  I stood awkwardly, wondering where Hale would sit if he did actually show up, and inadvertently caught Cleghorn’s eye. I had no reason to think he’d recognize me, but he lit up with excitement and gestured me over. “I was hoping you’d show up,” he said. “I peruse
d the Zeitgeist Journal archives and found a piece of yours that would be perfect for tonight’s reading.”

  The real author blinked a few times, then said, “But I’m reading tonight.”

  Cleghorn gave a very satisfied nod, and repeated, “Zeitgeist Journal.”

  Since that was neither a question, nor an argument, nor any real attempt at conversation, there was no way for the real author to respond. Though he did mutter, “But I shelled out twenty bucks for the wine,” as he wandered off to go greet some of the attendees.

  “Maybe you should let him keep his hour of glory for himself,” I suggested hopefully.

  “With you in my clutches? I wouldn’t dream of it.” Cleghorn leaned in and said, “He’s self-published, too.” He shoved a tablet into my hand. “Your piece is a few years old, but I think it’s just as relevant today, if not more so.”

  I glanced down at the title: Deconstructing the Paradigm of Toxic Masculinity in the Gay Community by Victor Baine.

  Kill me now.

  “I’ll need to take a raincheck,” I said reflexively—because in all likelihood, I’d come across a word I not only didn’t quite know, but couldn’t even pronounce. “I left my glasses at home.”

  “Not a problem.” Cleghorn snatched the tablet out of my hands and gave it a few jabs. “Just increase the font size.”

  I should have come up with a better initial objection. According to all the tradecraft, claiming an urgent need to be somewhere else, from needing to take a pill to declaring you’ve left the oven on, was a legitimate way to get out of a sticky situation that might expose your fake identity. But you only had one shot before it was clear you were just making an excuse. What I should’ve done was announce that I’d left all my pills in my oven and my house was currently burning down. But now I’d only draw attention to myself if I dredged up any more objections. It was tempting to try just one more excuse anyhow—maybe sudden-onset dyslexia—when I heard the familiar thump of Sylvester Hale’s cane on the worn carpet.

  Great.

  The only thing to do was buck up and read the damn article. Yes, I could turn tail and run, and save myself the excruciating trauma of reading one of my “think pieces” aloud. But the aisles were narrow, and Bly was on his way. If we managed to trap Hale in a conversation about the afterlife—tonight, here—I could be wearing my own jeans, sleeping in my own bed, and more importantly, picking up my own man’s wayward socks by tomorrow.