Strengthened by her perceived courage, David pressed his foot on the accelerator, and the road sign disappeared behind them: YOU ARE LEAVING MONTE VERDE.
Thank God, she thought. Thank Americo.
What was he doing there? she found herself wondering.
The truth didn't matter. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth, Americo had said, and she didn't intend to. It didn't matter how incredibly timely his intervention had been. What mattered was they were free.
Maybe he had Max micro-chipped? she thought. He seems like the kind of guy who'd protect an investment—especially his child.
But her mother had a different opinion: What if he'd come for dinner, Juniper? That's something to consider, don't you think?
She racked her brain for something to take her mind off the useless speculation. There was a secondary camera in the glove compartment. June took it out: a small, virtually useless thing, a backup camera for touristy-type photos. Now that her good camera was gone, she supposed it would have to do. She brought it to her eye, and turned to look back at the retreating town through the viewfinder.
In her mind's eye, she saw beachfront houses topple into the black froth of the ocean. She envisioned the Mission set ablaze in the dead of night, burning against the moonless desert. She saw gardeners, maids, chauffeurs, construction workers and janitors stalk through the streets, using the tools of their trades against their exploiters. She saw the mesas crumble and the forests burn, as if now that outsiders knew its secrets, the town of Monte Verde were being obliterated from the earth, like a Biblical city by the hand of God—or Americo Morales.
Good riddance, she thought, and snapped another photo.
SCAVENGERS
1
TWO DAYS BEFORE the first of those murders you may have heard about on the news, I saw Jim Taymor stapling a poster to the utility pole between his yard and mine. I'd been mowing my lawn, and I stopped the mower to ask him what was up. I recall thinking it was for a special event at the restaurant, but the look on his face told me I was wrong. Jim had been my neighbor and my friend long enough for me to know the not-so-subtle working of his jaw meant he was jazzed up about something. A glimpse at the poster he'd half tacked up told me what it was before he spoke.
LOST DOG
had been printed in large computer letters up top. Below this was a picture of their rat terrier, Rosco. I happen to know his show name was Rosco P. Coltrane, after the idiot deputy in The Dukes of Hazzard, which I believe Jim or his wife, Leanne, had thought was funny. Like the character, the dog was perpetually terrified, and the photo, with its downward-pointing wide angle, had captured this look just fine. Below that were a few details: black and white coloration, that he'd been wearing a red collar around his neck, that he was "very friendly" (a fact I cannot attest to, having known Rosco intimately for the six years they'd had him), and that he had a "slightly crooked" tail.
I don't suppose I have to tell you I'd never been fond of the Taymors' dog. He was loud, rambunctious, and somewhat feral—if there was ever a dog so different from its owners, Rosco was it. But upon witnessing the look of woe on Jim's face that morning, the sympathy I offered was honest. I said I hoped he'd find it (a lie), and that I'd keep my eye out for Rosco myself and be sure to contact Jim or Leanne the second I heard or saw anything. To be frank, I had my doubts the little mutt would ever be seen or heard from again.
What I'd been thinking of were the cougars reputed to be in the area. Family pets had gone missing more often than usual that spring and summer—outdoor cats in particular, but gates were sometimes left open, and runaway dogs had not escaped the fate of their feline brothers and sisters. It was not unheard of to see mangled raccoons splayed out far from the closest road, nor carcasses of squirrels that were little more than fur and bone scattered on someone's lawn. I'm certain the thought of those damn cougars hadn't escaped Jim and Leanne Taymor, either. Hell, Jim's LOST DOG announcement remained half-tacked between a new one for a missing orange tabby, and a weathered one for a black Lab named Chico, its PLEASE CALL tabs flapping hopelessly in a light spring breeze.
If only it had been the work of cougars, life in our little village of Knee High would have gone on as it always had—not quite simply (I am not so delusional—at least not yet—as to believe life anywhere can be altogether simple), but less hurried, perhaps. And certainly we would not be on the map, as we are now, resting uneasily in the collective forebrain of the country at large, already weary from the previous tragedy du jour.
Would things have happened differently if Rosco the trained rat terrier had shown up shivering and hungry at their doorstep that night, or any subsequent night leading up to the dreadful culmination of their crimes? I can't say for certain. It is difficult for me to believe Jim would have done what he had over the death of a dog, no matter how he felt about Rosco. What I can say is that Jim and Leanne Taymor were two of the finest people I have ever met, yet their crimes, of which they are most certainly guilty, remain among the most heinous things I have ever heard. I believe they call that a dichotomy. It's a word I've considered quite a bit since Jim and Leanne dropped in on my wife and me, little over half a year ago now, and revealed to us their terrible secret.
If you watch the news (and who can avoid it these days, what with round-the-clock footage of all the late-breaking celebrity scandals and puff pieces your brain can handle), you might think you know all there is to know about what the news took to calling "The Taymor Murders." Even if you'd hung on every word of that damned media circus throughout the fall and winter of 2011/12, questions remain. Their motivations seemed to defy logic, their impenitence was harder to swallow. If they had pled insanity, we might have understood; if they'd appeared insane, even, rather than how we'd seen them as they were hauled off toward prison and sitting in court, both wearing identical expressions of happy-pill serenity, it might have made some sense. If they hadn't looked like the typical small-town White America couple with the minivan and the 2.5 children, we might have been able to scratch the itch in our subconscious, the one which reminds us we all walk a tightrope between sanity and madness, a rope that is both slippery and barbed. The odds are not stacked in our favor.
Before the murders, Jim and Leanne had been what folks would call "people people," and if you leafed through either of their high school yearbooks (they hadn't met until university, having grown up on either side of the state), you'd see they always had been, though they didn't care for the term and surely would never have applied it to themselves. Jim and Leanne weren't the type to toot their own horns, blessed with a knack for remaining humble even while receiving well-deserved praise. Friends and neighbors had been quick to assure the frenzy of newshounds that the Taymors were "friendly, caring people," "a happy and loving couple," and "two of the finest people you could ever meet."
I've always thought one of the sadder aspects of the whole mess—aside from all those dead folks, which is unquestionably tragic—was that every single good thing those people had to say about the Taymors was the God's honest truth. They say it's the quiet ones, the nice ones, who commit some of the worst crimes. I don't know how true that is; what, for instance, would Hitler's neighbors have said about him? Likely nothing pleasant. But it was certainly true in their case.
How could such a happy, generous couple commit the horrible acts of violence they showed on the news, you ask? How could two peace-loving, human-rights-touting Democrats—who'd voted for Gore, I should add, before anyone had cared a lick for that tiresome old fool—murder six innocent men and women, a young boy and a dog... in cold blood, and with all the ease and indifference of a child trampling an ant hill?
Well, I happen to be privy to that information, much as I often wish I weren't. I was their neighbor throughout the whole mess, and I remain their friend. I am the only one who did not abandon them after they were sentenced to seven consecutive life-sentences each, with zero chance of parole. Whether that makes me a fool or not I'll leave up to you. Even my Virg
inia, who sat with me during their entire confession, gripping my hand under the table as the more appalling details were revealed, had been shrewd enough to jump ship when it seemed there was no redemption in sight.
From what they told me, during and after the incident, and from what I've pieced together myself through detective work and bald assumption, I'd like to tell you that story, if you'll hear it. You can make up your mind as to what's true and what isn't. I'm not even sure I have myself, to tell the truth.
And like I said, I was there.
2
THOUGH THEIR DOG was missing and presumed (by me, at least) to be dead, the so-called Taymor Murders began with the trash. It happened quite regular that Jim or Leanne would open up shop mid-morning to discover raccoons had gotten into the Dumpsters in the alley out back of La Costina again. "La Costina" in Knee High, Nebraska—can you imagine it? The name of that place was about the only whiff of pretension I'd ever gotten from them, otherwise we likely wouldn't have been as close as we'd become over the years.
It's all boarded up now. Nobody wants to eat at a place where people were murdered, and so far no one's been foolhardy enough to rent it out in the wake of it, even though they could for a song. Tragedies leave their imprints—not just on the bereaved, but on the community at large. I'm sure the good folks in Sandy Hook could tell you that. Or Sanford, Florida. Or Centennial, Colorado. Or any number of small towns across this great nation of ours. That particular piece of property is a black stain on the incorporated village of Knee High, and will be, I suspect, long after I'm gone.
When Jim came to me with his idea—it was Leanne's idea, in truth—to quit a perfectly good career as a geologist and open an Italian restaurant in a town with a population of roughly 2500 (this during the summer months, when migrant workers fill up the empty rentals and campgrounds), with virtually no tourism and the economy heading into the crapper, I told him flat-out he was crazy. As his best friend and his accountant, I felt I had the right.
That restaurant was meant to be their retirement fund; now their golden years will be on Uncle Sam's dime. Nobody ever expected it to do well. In actual fact most people thought it would go bust in less than a year's time. But word of its old-world charm and inventive take on traditional dishes carried to the city, and while other businesses fell into dissolution around it, La Costina drew in crowds every night.
Most of this had to do with Leanne's cooking. She'd started taking classes in the Big O as a lark after the fall of the Towers, to "take her mind off the tragedy," as she'd put it, though I suspect the tragedy she meant was one of a more personal nature, one which had been on her mind for some time by then. Pretty soon she was in charge of the cooking for all sorts of events around town. Knee High Collegiate's bake sale in the spring of 2002 paid for an entire class to go to Ecuador (God knows what they'd wanted to do down there, aside from muling cocaine back across the border), along with all brand-new equipment for a football team that had never done well in the rankings and probably never would. I doubt any of those kids had any delusions about being scouted by the Huskers, but hell if they didn't look sharp in those new uniforms.
Even so, nobody thought the restaurant stood a chance. People thought the both of them had gone crazy, an idea that came to haunt some of these folks just lately. Not only did the Taymors and La Costina prove our assumptions wrong, they did us one better and brought several small businesses back from the brink of extinction, with the help of some much-needed tourist bucks. No one could begrudge them their inexplicable success when said success restored hope to a town struggling to stay afloat like so many others, while the government fat cats gave handouts to corporations that had overspent their means.
Five years later they were still doing a fine business. The only trouble was with the raccoons, and for the self-employed, that was very little trouble indeed. At first. When it became big trouble, Jim came to me on the evening of May 1st while I sat on the veranda with a sweating bottle of O'Douls (which tasted like cold piss to me, but my blossoming love of the alcoholic kind in that first year of the Great Recession had almost cost me the love of my wife of thirty years), watching a storm gather on the outskirts of town. He nodded and sat beside me. Like the day before, when I'd seen him tacking up the LOST DOG sign, I could tell there was something on his mind; his eyes had a storm of their own brewing in them, an odd look for Jim Taymor. The only other time I'd seen him with a look like that, prior to that night in May, was when Leanne had had her miscarriage in '98.
It was not just the dog, missing three days by then, weighing on his mind.
Our own kids had grown and left the nest, Jim and Leanne being twenty-some years our juniors. But Virginia and I had kept pace with them in '98—Gin sometimes joked the Lewinsky scandal had been planting dirty thoughts in her head—and with our bedroom windows practically side-by-side, some nights it seemed like a competition. Jim and Leanne won. They had had a name chosen (Olivia) before Leanne had even started to show, which any fool could tell you is bad luck. As a professional accountant for forty-two years, and a retired one for six, I believe less in luck than in numbers. For instance, the chance of a woman in her mid-to-late-thirties losing a child is much higher than the odds of winning the $2 Powerball. Life is a Ponzi scheme, I tell you; you only get back what you put in, and more than likely you'll lose your shirt.
Jim sat in the Adirondack chair next to mine, where Gin would have been sitting with a cup of iced tea if she hadn't been visiting our eldest in North Dakota. When he planted his hands on the armrests, I realized with dismay I could see the bone of every knuckle, emblazoned white against his tanned skin. This was not good news I was about to be treated to, and I took another swig in preparation for it, hoping for the sweet sting of alcohol and getting nothing but bitter. I was expecting word of another miscarriage, or of financial crisis: the town's predictions of failure finally coming 'round the bend. Hell, even learning that Leanne had up and left him in the night would have been less bewildering than what he did say.
Less disconcerting.
"Have you ever heard of Frugaltarians?" he said after a time. There was a noisome whiff of trash on him, but that was nothing new; he often got his hands dirty at the restaurant, and some of the stink wouldn't wash off until his morning shower. I loathe to imagine what his side of the bed must have smelled like.
Right then he was eying the tract houses across the way. Not many had lights on, despite the growing dark. This was as much to do with the economy as with the fact that there was not much for the modern American family to do in Knee High on a rainy weekend evening. Children don't spend long nights playing board games with their folks like they did when Jessa and Tim were growing up, except for maybe the Mormons. These days they drove into the city to sit in darkened theaters and the Dave & Busters, their zombified faces tinted blue by the screens of their intelligent telephones.
I knew of them, the Frugaltarians. I'd heard of them from the news, where I suspect most people who don't have the internet hear of things like that. Dumpster divers, or so it was said. It had seemed like a reaction to the recession to me, but the Frugaltarians themselves said it was about social responsibility and an opposition to corporate greed, and I suppose that's a reaction to economic decline of a sort. These weren't homeless people, I should stress. The Frugaltarians were hard-working Americans, rooting through the trash for edibles by choice, taking food from the mouths of vagrants. At least, that was what I had gleaned from the story.
"If we don't eat it," one woman in a smart business suit and tortoise-shell glasses told the reporter, "it'll go to waste."
"I guess the thrill of boycotting the Walmart must have lost its luster," Gin had said, shaking her head the way she always does when something goes beyond her comprehension.
I told Jim that I had.
He nodded. It was the sort of nod you might expect of a man who'd just been told he had cancer of the rectum. Then he said: "They're not what they seem." His eyes remained unwavering o
n the black windows of the empty subdivision, finger bones chalk-white on the armrest.
I guessed he was going to elaborate, but he never did. What he did shook me more than anything he'd done since he had risen the creaky stairs to my porch: he stood up and walked right back down to the sidewalk, without even a fond farewell. Right then I had an inkling Jim was in deeper trouble than I'd imagined, and I should have mentioned it to Gin when she returned from Jessa's dormitory that Wednesday.
Like Jim Taymor departing my porch, his head hung low while God bowled a perfect game in the distance, I said nothing. If I had told Virginia, she would undoubtedly have gone to Leanne. A woman should be spared her man's darkest moments, that's what I've always believed. This moment was surely the darkest side of Jim I'd seen since they'd moved into the house beside us in September of '96.
The darkest by far.
3
I DIDN'T TELL Gin, and that's on me.
If I'd told her, could I have stopped events from progressing the way they had? I often wonder that now, particularly on those nights with a storm threatening in the east. More than likely the two of us would have been drawn into it ourselves, and that would have been good for no one. The same government who bailed out Merrill Lynch and Citibank, in spite of the massive bonuses provided to upper management, would have been handing out meals and accommodations, meager as they might be, to four lifers instead of two. And although I've always thought Virginia looked damned fine in orange, it would do me no good being halfway across the state in the men's institution and her in the women's. Distance is one problem those little blue pills cannot solve, with the exception of a few meager inches.
The next time I saw Jim, he was out mowing his front lawn, wearing that silly, sweaty blue bandana he always tied around his head while doing chores, although he was not so much mowing the lawn as running the push mower in a zigzag pattern around the center of it, counter to his usual methodical rows. Only a few days had passed between then and that night on the porch, but Jim's hair was unkempt and I could see cheekbones where he'd had a bit of pudginess since his high school days. I didn't find out until many months later what had happened to cause such a drastic change in the interim. I'll spare you the wait.
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