Life Is Short and Then You Die

by Kelley Armstrong

  That was a good thing. He couldn’t stop thinking about death, but at least he could direct it.

  Besides, if anyone deserved to die, surely it was his grandmother. Clara Marie Devane Dent had given birth to William Cornelius Dent, Jasper’s father, and that sin alone demanded some sort of punishment. But Gramma was also crazier than a cat in a laser pointer factory. Racist, paranoid, you name it, she had it going on in her graying skull.

  Even as a young child, before his father had been arrested and sent to prison for the rest of his (un)natural life, Jasper had both disliked and feared his grandmother. She vacillated from an almost childlike mien to fierce and brutal ranting, her moods shifting like a whipsaw in a strong wind. Younger Jasper had avoided her when at all possible, often prowling the dark, cobwebbed recesses of her rambling, falling-apart old house while his father placated her and calmed her and tolerated her.

  But now Billy was in jail and Jasper wasn’t a visitor in his grandmother’s house—he lived in it. All the time. Whether he wanted to or not.

  A social worker named Melissa Hoover had brought him here the day after Billy’s arrest. The police—specifically, Sheriff Tanner—had taken Jasper to the hospital, to check him for injuries and wounds, even though Jasper had complained and protested that Billy had never struck him or harmed him in any way. No one believed him. They’d poked and prodded him, checked every last inch of him, and when they found exactly nothing, they’d finally let him sleep.

  Hoover had been there when he’d woken up the next morning, her smile too wide, her eyes too bright. Jasper knew how to read people—a gift handed down by his father, who could size up victims at a glance—and he read Hoover in an instant. Too eager. Too hopeful. Smart and savvy enough that she was dangerous to him, but also to herself.

  He told her what she wanted to hear, making certain that he pretended to slip up a few times. She thought she was taking him down paths he wanted to avoid, when in reality they hiked nowhere he did not want to go.

  In the end, she remanded him to the custody of his grandmother, his only living kin.

  Better than foster care, he reasoned, but still not ideal.

  “Ideal” would be living on his own, with no one around to control him or corral him. For that to happen, his grandmother had to go away.

  Easy enough.

  He just had to decide how.

  He sat in the room on the topmost floor of her house, the room that she said was his, but that he thought of as borrowed. He hadn’t fully unpacked his things yet. He hadn’t put anything on the walls. He would go back to his house someday, his real house. He was just a boarder here. It was temporary.

  This was just a place to do his homework and sleep. He pored over his algebra notes, which made precisely zero sense.

  Without knocking, his grandmother came into his room. “Dinner!” she announced, even though it was four in the afternoon. With little fanfare, she plopped a bowl down on his desk.

  A bowl of Lucky Charms—dry—with half-cooked ground beef mixed in.

  “It’s your favorite,” she said brightly

  “It’s not even dinnertime!” he blurted out. Why that was the thing bothering him he couldn’t say.

  “No backtalk!” she shouted, her mood shifting suddenly. He had no time to dodge or flinch—she slapped him as hard as she could on the back of his head.

  Fortunately, “as hard as she could” wasn’t all that hard. Gramma was built like an anorexic scarecrow, and her slap had probably caused more lingering pain to her hand than to his head.

  Still.

  Still, he shouldn’t have to worry about being smacked around all the time. Billy was a serial killer, but he’d never so much as spanked Jasper.

  “Knock it off, Gramma!” he scolded, turning around in his chair. She slapped out at him again, and this time he brought up his hand, deflecting the blow.

  She howled in pain, grabbed back her wounded hand, and hissed as she backed out of the room.

  ONE: THE ACCIDENT

  This is the easiest one, you know.

  She’s old. Old people are clumsy and have trouble seeing and hearing. They’re fragile, and normal everyday things like tripping or banging into a doorjamb shatter their bones and send them to the hospital.

  If you fall down a flight of stairs, you’ll get up and walk away with some bruises and a feeling of self-recrimination.

  But if she falls down a flight of stairs …

  She’ll just break.

  So you line the top stair with slippery plastic. Remove the four screws holding the handrail in place. In the middle of the night, you wake her up, tell her there’s danger, watch her go running for the stairs …

  Pick up the plastic and reattach the handrail. Call 911. Oh no, my grandmother fell down the stairs …

  * * *

  The next day, he couldn’t even bear to go back to her house after school. She had once again packed him an inedible lunch—today’s consisting of wadded-up paper, some old screws, and a hairnet. On other occasions, he’d found a toy rubber frog, a chunk of drywall, and a collection of coin batteries in his lunch bag, among other things. Fortunately, his best friend, Howie (his only friend, if he was being honest), had not just a full lunch box, but also five bucks in his pocket. They had a pretty decent lunch, all things considered.

  “Your grandmother has a weird sense of humor,” Howie had offered, edging into territory best left unexplored.

  Jasper had shrugged. He didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t want to make it any more real.

  So after school, he grabbed his bike and rode out to the house he’d grown up in, the one he still thought of as home. It was impossible to think of his grandmother’s house as home. It just wasn’t. Home was the place with his bedroom, the place with the living room he watched TV in, the place with the kitchen where he watched his dad make dinner most nights, including his favorite, Billy’s special recipe for macaroni and cheese.

  The place with—yeah, OK—the rumpus room, that hidden enclave where Billy kept the trophies from his serial killing.

  It had been a little over a year since Sheriff G. William Tanner had had a lucky day and arrested Billy. Tanner didn’t know what he’d had on his hands at the time. He thought he’d lucked into apprehending the Hand-in-Glove Killer. But Billy was Hand-in-Glove and so much more: Green Jack. The Artist. And many others. Jasper had answered the door that day, thought nothing of the sheriff standing there. He should have, though. He’d been taught to despise and fear those whom Billy dubbed “the bastard cops,” but for some reason on that day his danger sense had been on the blink, and it had seemed perfectly ordinary for Sheriff Tanner to stand there on the stoop. And within twenty minutes, Billy was pepper-sprayed and handcuffed on the living room floor. Right there.

  In his house. The place where he’d obeyed Billy’s orders that day; he’d run to the rumpus room to gather and destroy the evidence of Billy’s crimes. And then Sheriff Tanner had exploded into the rumpus room, his gun leveled, shouting at Jasper to drop the backpack full of souvenirs …

  Drop it! Drop all of it! I swear to Christ I’ll shoot you!

  Jasper’s front tire juddered over a piece of broken asphalt, shaking him out of the memory. He’d never actually believed that the sheriff would shoot him, but a part of him was beginning to suspect that this was naive. He’d been closer to death that day than he wanted to believe.

  He skidded his bike to a halt at the spot where his driveway met the road. To his shock, there was something new here.

  The house had stood alone and neglected since shortly after Billy’s arrest. There had been no bail and Billy’s trial had been expedited at his own request. Within months of his arrest, as the scope of his crimes became evident, it became obvious that Billy Dent would never breathe free air or cross the threshold of his own house again.

  With the help of Howie, Howie’s parents, and Melissa Hoover, Jasper had packed up his things and moved into Gramma’s house. The house he’d
grown up in sat on its lot, shrinking behind a lawn that no one would bother tending to.

  But now … Now there was something new. The lawn was still wild, but there was a sign staked in the front yard, just barely high enough to be seen over the tall grass.

  It was a real estate agent sign. Someone named Darcy Quinn.

  And topping it off was a big red banner that read SOLD!

  * * *

  Jasper slammed his way into his grandmother’s house. Sold? Sold? What the hell was that about?

  Gramma was sitting in the living room, watching cartoons. She usually left on a steady diet of insane foreign cooking shows, but occasionally the remote accidentally led her to binge episodes of old cartoons. As he stomped into the living room, she was staring slack-jawed at Ren & Stimpy.

  “Gramma!” he said, more loudly than he’d intended. Still, it worked—she started, gasped, and turned to him.

  “Jon!” she said, pleased. “When did you get home? Dinner’s almost ready!”

  It was actually close to dinnertime this time, but Jasper wasn’t his grandfather, Jon Dent. No one was Jon Dent because he’d died a million years ago, before Jasper was born.

  “It’s not Grandad, Gramma. It’s me. Jasper.” He’d come into the house angry and confused. Now the delay and the need to walk her through history into the present flustered him and made him angrier. “Jasper. Your grandson. I live here.”

  She blinked rapidly. “What does that have to do with dinner?”

  “Nothing!” he yelled. “Nothing! Focus! Someone bought my house! Who bought my house?”

  Gramma tilted her head, her unbound gray hair spilling down that side. Her eyes were wide and vacant, an icy, almost transparent blue. Like his father’s.

  “No one bought the house,” she said slowly. “We live here.”

  “Not this house! My house! My real house!”

  As he ranted, he realized she was shrinking away from him, occasionally calling him Jon. Tears gathered in her eyes, and something deep inside him told him to stop, but something even deeper told him to keep going. He leaned in close, screaming now, disgorging all the pain, the anger, and fear he’d felt since Billy’s arrest.

  And Gramma began softly slapping the side of her own head, first with one hand, then with both, knocking her face back and forth like a Ping-Pong ball as she went. The tears streamed down her face.

  “I’m sorry, Jon!” she cried. “I won’t let it happen again! I didn’t mean to do it! I’m sorry!”

  As he watched, she pulled her feet up onto the sofa and curled into a fetal position, sobbing, covering her head and face with her hands and forearms.

  “Please don’t hit me anymore!” she whimpered.

  Jasper took a step back. He realized he was heaving his breaths, barely able to get one in before purging it. He turned and ran from the living room, down the hall that led to the kitchen, then burst through the back door.

  The backyard was fenced in, private. He ran its length and pounded his fists on the fence, listening to the rattle of the boards. A scream clawed at his throat from the inside, but he refused to give it voice. He was invisible here, not inaudible. Neighbors would hear him. Rumors and gossip would zip around town like Wi-Fi signals. Bad enough he was the serial killer’s son. The last thing he needed was people talking about how he was cracking up.

  Like father, like son. Always thought that kid was off. Heard him out in the backyard just screaming his head off the other day …

  It wasn’t fair. He wanted his life back. He wanted things back the way they were before.

  But at the same time, he knew that things shouldn’t be the way they were before. That would mean Billy was free. Out there. Killing people. Billy had taught Jasper that hunting prospects (Billy’s word for his victims) was a good thing, a moral necessity, and Jasper had almost believed him. Almost.

  He knew that he couldn’t wish away Billy’s arrest. It was wrong.

  But it would mean Jasper could actually be happy.

  Back inside, Gramma had fallen asleep in her fetal position. Jasper was suddenly, savagely glad that he’d never met his grandfather. He knew Billy had committed unspeakable and grotesque crimes, but for some reason, his grandfather beating his grandmother seemed worse.

  Even though you want to kill her, he chided himself.

  Well, at least then she’d be dead and at peace, right?

  TWO: THE INTRUDER

  It’s a relatively peaceful town. Petty crime—public drunkenness, graffiti, that sort of thing.

  Still, the Lobo’s Nod sheriff’s office handles the odd burglary, an occasional mugging …

  At Billy’s knee, you learned the rudiments of breaking and entering. Not that you need to break into this house.

  But you can make it look as though someone broke in.

  Wait until quite late at night. Go into her room while she sleeps. Waken her roughly.

  She flails at you, sleep-addled. You allow her a few moments of successful defense. To make it look good.

  Then you beat her over the head with the heavy lamp at her bedside. Rummage through her dresser, leaving clothing and cheap jewelry scattered everywhere.

  Home invasion gone wrong. Thief breaks in looking for something valuable, wakes up old woman, scuffles … Boom. Dead.

  It happens. Even in the Nod, it happens.

  * * *

  When Gramma woke up a few hours later, she woke up mean. She betrayed no memory of their earlier conversation, and she no longer thought he was his grandfather.

  She thought he was Billy.

  “Marrying that woman!” she screamed, and hurled a notepad at him. Jasper knocked it aside. “I told you to steer clear of that bitch, and what did you? What did you do, Billy? You went and married her! She’s full of blackness and horror, that one! She’s no good!”

  Jasper clenched his jaw. His mother had disappeared years ago, no doubt one more of Billy’s victims, though his father refused to speak on the subject at all. And he wasn’t about to let his grandmother spew her crap about his mom. No way.

  “If you’d had the sense God gave a goose,” she went on, “you’d’ve turned your back soon as you saw her! Instead of letting her get inside you, worm her magic into you, and rot you from your own guts!”

  Trembling, he realized that all of the hypotheticals were falling away. If he stood here and continued listening to her, he would kill her flat out. No preplanning. No cover story. He would just kill her, period.

  He knew he had to wait. To bide his time. To be patient. If she died now, he would end up in the foster care system. He would be shipped off to who-knew-where, away from the only town he knew, the only people he knew.

  But in four short years, he would be eighteen. A legal adult. Able to make his own decisions and to care for himself. He would not need her any longer.

  Four years to plot and plan.

  He backed away from her, as though her invective were a force unto itself, shoving him back, and when he got to the door, he pulled it open, darted outside, and ran.

  THREE: THE OVERDOSE

  She takes a welter of medications, all of them meticulously organized in a massive plastic pill case gridded with days of the week along the top row, each column divided into morning, afternoon, dinner, and bedtime.

  It takes you maybe an hour with the original pill bottles and the internet.

  So simple to switch out some of the meds.

  Double up a dose here, halve a dose there …

  Beta-blockers and blood thinners and powerful diuretics …

  Gramma is a walking pharmacy, held in a precise and delicate balance.

  Tip that balance, and you tip her.

  Old folks make mistakes, people will say. No one will be shocked that an old woman accidentally took the wrong meds at the wrong time. Accidents happen all the time. Mistakes are made all the time.

  This is your favorite, to tell the truth.

  * * *

  He ran blind for a long time,
and then—as though guided by a homing instinct—found himself on the street where his best friend, Howie Gersten, lived. Howie’s parents—his mother, especially—weren’t fond of Jasper. Not anymore. They’d liked him just fine right up until Billy’s arrest. One more casualty of dear old dad’s career.

  Still, the Gerstens managed to pretend to tolerate him, at least. After a few gulps of air so that he wouldn’t appear out of breath from his run, he knocked on the door and waited.

  Mrs. Gersten answered. Her lips twitched into something resembling a smile. “Jasper. Hello.”

  “Hi,” he said, and threw her his most charming smile. It was a good one. Billy had taught it to him, and it usually knocked down her defenses a little bit. “Is Howie around?”

  She didn’t ask why he hadn’t called first. “Yes, he is, but we’re just sitting down to dinner.”

  Jasper startled. He looked around. Sure enough, it was getting darker out. He hadn’t even realized.

  “Ah. Oh. Okay.” Stupid. The startle and then the babble … Stay in control, Billy had told him. Always stay in control.

  He offered up the charming smile again and tried to recover. “Thanks. I guess I better be getting home, then.”

  She actually let him get down the concrete steps leading up to the front door before she sighed and said, “Would you like to join us?”

  Cold cereal and old cartoons with Gramma or a hot meal and his best friend? Not even close. Jasper allowed himself a relieved, triumphant grin before he turned around, said, “Sure, I guess,” and bounded back up the stairs.

  * * *

  Howie was delighted to see him. At six foot something and still growing, he was a type A hemophiliac who seemed incapable of taking his own disease seriously. Or anything else, for that matter. The first time Jasper had seen Howie after Billy’s arrest, Howie had looked at him very soberly and said, “Man, your dad will do anything to get out of coming to the school talent show, won’t he?”