SUSPENSE THRILLERS-A Boxed Set (7 page)

As he poured the bourbon and mixed in the coffee, Sam knew he was lying to himself. He did not want it all over again. He wished it was almost over. He wished he were eighty instead of sixty and that there were no more races to run.

Despair settled over him with a comfortable familiarity. Sam raised the cup. By noon the bourbon would be gone.

Nick had been up for two hours when Daley made his first appearance in the kitchen. He groped for the coffeepot, his eyes hardly able to focus in the early morning light streaming in the window.

"You're going to be late for class," Nick said. He took another bite of the Butterfinger candy bar he was having for breakfast. He tried to keep his voice light and casual to hide his mood, which had moved inexorably toward depression. He knew he sounded like a pushy older brother or, even worse, like a nagging mother, but he could not help it.

Daley nodded as he sat down at the table. He took a swallow of coffee, debating whether or not to spit the scalding liquid back into the cup. He grimaced and swallowed.

"If you wouldn't stay out so late…" Nick began, then suddenly shifted gears. "Where did you go last night?"

"Leave me alone, Nick." Daley said it without rancor. He just didn't want to talk this morning. He tried the coffee again, more cautiously,

"When will you get back today?"

"Nick, just lay off, will you? I have three classes, a full load today, and afterward I may go furniture browsing. I don't know when I'll be back."

“Furniture, my ass. That stuff’s nothing but old spindly junk. I don’t see why anyone buys it.”

“You don’t appreciate antiques, that’s all. It’s not my fault if your taste runs to chrome and plastic."

He pulled the toaster into the center of the counter and popped four slices of wheat bread into the slots.

"I don’t know how you can eat that stuff." Nick frowned at the loaf of wheat bread.

"Goddamnit, Nick! If you're not mothering me you're judging me, and if you're not judging me you're needling me. Why can't you leave me the hell alone?"

Nick chewed his candy, his gaze resting on the far kitchen door. He pretended not to hear the outburst.

Daley jerked open the refrigerator door and took out a tub of unsalted butter. "If you'd get off your duff and find a job, you wouldn’t have time to criticize me," he said. "We're been home almost six months and you're like a rock. You don't go out of the house. You sit around eating junk food and acting like the world has come to an end. You watch me like a goddamn eagle. When are you going to get off this?”

“I knew you didn’t want me to live with you.”

“That’s not the point, Nick.”

“You want to bring girls back here so you can fuck around and you don’t do it because of me.”

Daley slammed the buttered toast hard against the counter top. “No! No, you see how you are? You’re so self-pitying you turn everything around and put it in personal terms. I don’t care about bringing a girl here, not yet, I…”

Nick was pointing the yellow candy wrapper at his brother. “You want to, admit it.”

“I give up. I’m talking to a fucking rock, I swear to God.” Daley stared at the toast and shrugged his shoulders. “I have to get my books. I’m late.”

"That's what I told you." Nick was triumphant.

Daley gave an exasperated sigh and hurried up the stairs.

Nick crumpled the candy wrapper and dropped it to the table. He walked into the living room, slumped into a wooden rocking chair Daley had salvaged from a flea market, and stared gloomily through a leaded-glass window that faced the street. When Daley rushed down the stairs and out the door without saying good-bye the old two-story brick town house settled around Nick like a shroud floating into place.

Nick knew Daley was right. He should get out and find work. A job would do him good. It would take him away from the dark brooding house and keep him from going truly mad again.

Daley had slipped easily back into civilian life. He enrolled at the University of Houston on a part-time basis. In the small alcove upstairs he set up a woodworking bench and shelves for tools. He spent his free time refinishing antique furniture he found at auction or estate sales. He resold his handiwork for three times what he paid, and he was rapidly gaining a reputation as an expert in restoration. Though Nick disliked the uncomfortable, forbidding look of the pieces, he thought it was smart of his brother to take up such a lucrative hobby.

When Nick thought about Daley, he felt a small, hard lump form in his chest. He was both proud and envious of him. Daley knew what he wanted and could achieve it. Where Nick had only vague longings, Daley knew precisely what direction to follow. He would get an education, he said, and the degree would be a crutch to lean on if the antique business went bust. Nick, on other hand, felt no desire to add diplomas to his other non-accomplishments. He had argued with Daley, “There are ten million people going to college. How many over-educated gas jockeys you figure we need in his country?” Nick shut his eyes and rubbed his lids roughly, He could not help it. He just did not want much of anything.

He would find a job because he had to, but it would not matter what kind of job it was. He had heard a nearby burglar alarm company was hiring and he could try for an installer's job. That would be easy. He would get a van supplied to him and his time would be his own. He would not have any boss hanging over his shoulder. He would go out and get the job, then he would have something to celebrate with Daley.

Wouldn't Daley be proud of him? Wouldn't he be relieved things were back to normal?

Normal?

Nick rubbed his eyes again, blotting out the world.

He thought about the garrote upstairs in the old cedar box, its serpentine length curled around his service medals.

#

Nick got the job. His happiness carried him on a long walk to downtown Houston where he window-shopped and watched the crowds. In the afternoon he went to a bar and ordered one Cuba Libre after another. He was celebrating. It was what men did to celebrate: either get drunk or fuck and he had never been all that interested in fucking. By sundown Nick was drunk and decided he loved the world and all his fellow men. He staggered home in the dark, his surprise speech ready.
I got a job
, he would say. What you think about that, Daley? He practiced the words and sometimes caught himself giggling like a schoolgirl. Oh, wouldn't Daley be proud of him!

He slipped on the steps and almost fell down. His door key got stuck in the lock, and after three unsuccessful tries to loosen it, he opened his mouth to call Daley. That’s when he heard a high-pitched feminine squeal of delight float down from an upstairs window. Nick held the key tightly and listened, afraid to hear it again. Why would a woman’s voice be…?

"Ohhh, Daley, please! Don't tickle me, please don’t.”

It was true. His brother had a woman in the house and he had brought her home because...because of their morning quarrel? Because he preferred a woman's company to his brother's?

Nick’s fist hit the key in the door and it turned sharply.

He was shocked into sobriety. He stepped into the black foyer listening for any noises coming from Daley’s room. He slammed the door with such force the glass panes rattled.

"Nick? Is that you?" Daley called from the second floor.

Nick grimaced and felt a childish urge to stomp his feet. Rage boiled inside him.

"Nick...?" Daley called again.

"Who else?" Nick shouted, giving in to his anger, as he stomped to his bedroom.

The rain started immediately, beating against the windows with each new gust of wind.

#

Daley lay in bed propped up on pillows while the worst of the storm raged. It was near midnight. He watched Madra Halsworthy as she slept. The lightning streaking across the bedroom windows illuminated Madra's young, naked body. It was still astounding to find her in his bed. He had tried to approach her all semester. Three months of closing in and backing away. She was not someone to be easily captured.

Unlike the other students, she dressed eccentrically in long, ground-sweeping skirts and soft flat shoes. But it was the ankle-length black velvet cape lined in lush crimson satin that really set her apart. The cape had a stiff six-inch collar that stood up around her neck, serving to shield her profile from view. When she leaned forward, her face peeked out like a slice of pale moon from behind a night cloud.

Finally Nick had cornered her in the hallway. She had backed up against the wall, her dark eyes burning with indignation because he had made her drop her books.

“Look what you've done!”

"This was the only way I could hope to catch you," he had said.

"What do you want?" Her voice was a whisper and her eyes stared at the center of his chest. She reminded him of a helpless trapped rabbit.

"I'm sorry," he said, retrieving her books and papers from the floor. She had not moved. Her eyes were glazed and distant. "Madra?" It was obvious she did not hear him. "Madra?" She finally blinked. "Are you an alright? I only wanted to meet you. I didn't mean to scare you."

When she spoke it was poetry, but the words were so soft he could hardly understand her. Emily Dickinson, she told him later as they sat in a dark student hangout getting to know one another. Emmy was a passion of hers and she knew two dozen of her poems by heart. Eighteenth century history was another passion, as was red wine, small English sports cars, and shocking lesser mortals by living just exactly the way she wished. In two hours he knew most everything there was to know about Madra Halsworthy, and he was damned intrigued. Two hours later she moved her few clothes and possessions into the Ringer household.

They were a couple.

Thunder boomed outside the window and Daley felt a chill. He covered Madra and himself. He slipped down on the pillows, fitted his face into the fragrant place between her warm neck and shoulder.

How was he going to explain this to Nick? Daley wondered. His brother would be angry enough there was a woman in the house. But what would be do when he found out she was living there?

SIX MONTHS LATER a distraught man walked in a small, forgotten, overgrown cemetery searching for a link to his youth. He longed for peace, but it was nowhere to be found. There was a woman named Madra living in his house in Houston. Her name meant hell and trouble. Her coming signaled death in the man's stony heart.

He walked the cemetery, the wind ruffling his blond hair. Beneath one of the many plain stone markers lay his mother, but he could not remember which marker sheltered her. He had not been in the cemetery in years. When she died, they had been too poor to afford an engraved granite stone. Feeling ashamed, he decided one day he would have a gravestone erected.

In the ledger for the cement markers was a list of the dead. Among them was the name Mary Stuart Ringer. Her plot was numbered and could be located with a map. Mary's son could not disturb the old gatekeeper for such useless information. Any marker would do. Any grave.

He stood before one. A daddy-long-legs spider crawled up a dried brown stalk and clung motionless at the top when a chilling breeze rattled the weeds.

"You didn't try to understand," the man whispered to the cold ground. "You left us behind. "

He waited for her reply but there was none. The blank, apathetic marker winked at him the second he turned his back and took his shadow away.

From the deserted cemetery he drove across Bloomington to the old house. He was surprised to find it still standing. The weathered, squat five-room house peered out from a tangle of creeping ivy that covered every crack. The windows were blank, lifeless. Splinters from the door hung from the wood like sharp tongues.

Home. Where was it? What did it mean?

He drove across a dead winter town that did not resemble the one he remembered and found the road leading to the ten acres Mary Ringer had bought in the early sixties. It had been paid for with blood money.

A year after her husband left she had been notified Armand Ringer was dead and his insurance policy with the oil rigger's company was still in her name. "I'll buy that piece off Doff Road and we'll build a house on it one day," she told the boys. Build a house with what? For whom? The land sat neglected, forgotten.

Until one of the boys thought of it. It was a game. Macabre and unholy, but nonetheless in the beginning it was a sort of game. Bury the killed animals on that lonely wilderness of ten acres. The animals would be missing, but there would be no evidence to prove they were dead--murdered.

The game included finding ways to dispose of the remains. They buried the first ones in the hard ground, digging until their young hands blistered and began to bleed on the pickax and the shovel. Then they buried them in the trees and called that an Indian burial ground. For a while they constructed mock ships, tiny, rough-planked contraptions with sails made from torn shirts. There was not enough water for a decent Viking burning at sea so they set them aflame in a rusty red ditch where a tiny stream of water flowed and had to turn away, holding their noses and breathing through their mouths when the stench was too bad.

Together they did it. Often it was done under the cover of night, the stars their only witnesses.

Ten scrubby, wooded acres of secrets. A place of death. He stood facing the past, trying to find the meaning of it, feeling the urge to kill again and to bring fresh blood to the earth. The wind blew up, slapping him in the face, stinging him with cold.

His eyes swept the boundaries of his land. On one side was a dilapidated wooden fence no one had bothered to repair. On the other was a wide empty ditch that rarely carried rainwater. And in the middle was a desolate parcel where no man walked save ghosts.

He turned away, shivering. He was not afraid. Whoever said he was afraid was a liar. He was determined to bring sacrifice to the land. To his home.

This time he would leave behind evidence of his great vengeance. His coming would create a storm of fear.

He smiled.
Liberation, so sweet.