The Next (25 page)

The door did not open.

When I emerged from the bathroom dressed in clean clothes, Marzoli turned to me, polishing the silver framed photo of Johanna and me.

“Do you want this front and center on your desk or back on the shelf?”

I knew if Johanna walked in the room right now, she’d look around and smile with approval. I knew she’d view this environmental improvement as a definitive step closer to my commitment to a marble kitchen-island future with her. When Johanna returned to ask for my thumbs up or thumbs down on that future, I knew which direction my thumb would go.

“In the trash.”

Marzoli shook his head. “If you were ready to throw it away, you would have.”

He placed the photo on the shelf between two other gleaming, polished, framed photos that had not been placed there previously. I suddenly recognized the children pictured in them. My heart squeezed tight.

“What did you…where did you…” I stuttered.

“I found them buried in your closet in a box. Mom and Dad?”

The pair of photos we’d not shot with rifles stared back at me like visitors from another world. I froze in a catatonic onslaught of mixed emotions. I closed my eyes as the previous euphoria was suddenly punctured by terror…

Paul and I held the axes above our shoulders, poised to strike as a hot, heavy cloud of smoke engulfed us.

I shook my head vigorously.

No! I will not let this memory victimize me!

“Tell me.” I heard Marzoli speak to me firmly.

“Tell you what?” I retorted.

We shouted at the top of our lungs. “Now, Mom? Now?”

For the first time, Marzoli’s voice rang with true anger. “Tell me where you just went!”

He was loud. Too loud.

“Keep your voice down!” I whispered firmly.

We immediately bolted to the window to see if Marzoli’s outburst had attracted any attention. It had not. We’d previously decided Marzoli would begin his performance the moment Layworth began to stir. The man did not stir, asleep undisturbed on his bed in a silk bathrobe, his laptop on his chest.

“I fear,” I said quietly, “the kids will return from school before Layworth wakes up.”

Marzoli remained stern.

“Then tell me this,” he said. “What do you fear will happen if you let me in on it?”

“You don’t understand,” I retorted. “Cleaning my
apartment
is the easy part.”

“Try me.”

I was backed into a tight corner. My stomach was knotting.

“My past has nothing to do with the investigation. Isn’t that what you’re here for? Isn’t that the sole reason?”

“Yes,” he said under his breath, betraying the bullshit of his reply.

“Marzoli, what do you want from me?”

He picked up the pictures of my parents and thrust them at me vehemently. “If you don’t start with the fucking truth, then I want more than you’re willing to give.”

I was right. The instant he heard me mutter
Grandfather
during one of my attacks, the bees buzzing in his hive would never settle down until he figured out why. Ignoring a mystery as troubling as mine was simply not in his goddamn iron-fisted Puerto Rican Sicilian constitution.

I felt flattered but helpless as fuck.

“I don’t know what happened to you that you’re trying to kill,” he said, “but it’s obviously fighting back. It already tried to give you frostbite on the fire escape. What’s your plan? To wait until it finds the right moment to finish you off for good?”

“You’re being hyperbolic.”

“I just hauled eight bags of shit down to the sidewalk.”

“Lots of people…”

He sharply interrupted whatever pathetic crap I was about to dribble. “Go the corner store and get me a turkey on rye. I’m starving.”

I turned away from him. The bitch knew how to hit his target.

Point fucking taken.

“I don’t even know how to…”

“What?” he asked adamantly.

“…how to access whatever the hell you want accessed!” I blurted, not precisely positive why I was so fucking furious. “I can’t even get a grip on when I get hijacked as it is!”

Marzoli calmed his voice for my sake. “Tell me a story.”

“What?”

“
The Brothers Save Jessie.
”

How the hell did he remember that phone conversation?

“I haven’t read it yet.”

“Why did the title surprise you?”

“Because…”

The blond boy stood over the body, looking at me ferociously.

“…because Jessie was killed. We
didn’t
save him.”

“Who’s Jessie?”

“When we were kids….”

“Who’s we?”

I closed my eyes and tried to put into words all that was coming back to me.

“My brother and I witnessed…we saw…Jessie stabbed beneath the tree. I saw…my brother behind the body…in the brush…I saw…”

The grass crackled in flames.

“What else?” he prodded gently.

“Run, Paul!” I yelled, and the blond boy turned his head just in time to see Paul disappear in a whisper in the tall yellow grass.

“What’s Paul running from?” Marzoli demanded.

The brush sixty feet away swayed just slightly indicating that Paul had already run too far to be caught. I scrambled to my feet, but the knife wound in my rib caused me to stumble. The blond boy caught my foot and dragged me across the dry rough ground, scraping my chin. I stretched my arms in front of me, but only succeeded in grasping and uprooting clumps of grass.

Suddenly I was pinned underneath him. The look of anger on his face was so vicious, I turned my head to the left, staring into the open eyes of Jessie, wide with the pain and horror he felt as he died. Stone still. Inches from my nose.

I felt the blond boy’s hard-on pressing into my groin. As he dug his pelvis into mine, I felt a sickness start at my groin and press its way up to my bellybutton. My stomach started lurching. Anything and everything I had consumed that morning was forcing its way up my throat—the tofu, the sprouts, the avocado, the pumpernickel bread, the sour grass, and the blackberries. I choked for air twice, then gushed green and cream-colored vomit right into the Blond Boy’s mean mug.

Bullseye.

Screaming in disgust, he backed off me. He tripped over Jessie’s body and stumbled toward the tree, wiping chunky slime from his eyes. I righted myself as best I could and hightailed it toward Paul in the bushes. The stab wound seared my side. My armpit was gouged raw where the branch had slammed into it. But none of that impeded my dash toward the shaded stream where I knew Paul would be hiding.

When I balanced on the log to cross the stream, I heard a soft voice from beneath it. “Is he following?”

I glanced behind. I was not being pursued.

“No.”

Paul emerged from the shadow beneath the log. Just like in one of our Adventure books, he’d submerged himself in a pool of water beneath a bridge.

Together, we climbed the hill back to King’s Rock, where we’d first spotted Jessie and the blond boy. We were breathing hard. We collapsed on our rock, grateful for our cool shadowed sanctuary. We only had a moment of respite before the blond boy came into view.

He dragged Jessie into the glen, propping the body against the tree Paul and I had been perched in. He pulled tufts of long dry grass from the earth and piled it around the body. He used his foot to rake oily eucalyptus leaves into mounds between Jessie’s legs.

What was he up to?

I heard Paul gasp before I saw it.

The blond boy withdrew his silver lighter.

God no!

He lit a piece of grass and dropped it on the leaves between Jessie’s legs. The oil on the eucalyptus leaves fueled the tiny flame like paint thinner. Within the space of a minute, Jessie’s jeans were on fire, and soon after that his body was engulfed in flames so thick we couldn’t see it anymore.

I understood precisely what that dolt thought he had to do to protect himself. The witnesses to the murder had escaped, so the evidence had to disappear. By the time I’d finished concluding this, the trunk of the tree was engulfed in fire. And by the time we saw the Blond Boy dash off down a path and vanish, orange and red fingers of flame licked the top of the tree. The surrounding trees began to catch fire, and within seven minutes the dry landscape in front of us billowed thick with black smoke, engulfing the entire glen.

Paul and I had inadvertently stumbled into being the catalyst for a fire in our park during one of California’s hottest summers.

The warm smoky wind began to whip in a different direction.

“Look!”

Paul pointed to a peninsula of tall yellow grass burning with flames, extending like a rapid flow of lava toward the nearest street…our neighborhood…our house.

We slid down the hill like skilled snow-boarders, hydro-graveling our tennis shoes in the long grooves of the water runoff channels, and then hopping to a new channel to continue our descent. We hit the bottom of the hill and sprinted through the deer paths toward the fire road carved out of the hill for emergency vehicles decades ago, bypassing the road and shortcutting us to the back of our house.

Where were the emergency vehicles now?

As we arrived at our backyard, we could smell the air thick with wood smoke. We looked behind us. To our astonishment, the wall of oily leafy eucalyptus trees that lined Wildcat Canyon Road beneath our house, had already lit up like hundred foot tall matches. They burst into flames as if the bark was infused with gunpowder. One tree after another, the fire exploded towards our house.

We burst through the dry rusty fence, through Mother’s unsuccessful weed-infested ivy landscaping, and into the backdoor. Father was passed out on the couch, cradling a bottle of bourbon in his armpit, three-quarters empty. The television was blaring a baseball game. Mother was nowhere to be seen.

We’d never tried to wake our father up when he was passed out. Should we poke him? Pull his hand? Throw water in his face? We were so accustomed to getting whacked whenever we disturbed him, we couldn’t overcome our fear even in that moment of emergency. Paul ran to look for Mother. I ran to the window in the kitchen to see the progression of the fire.

All the eucalyptus trees were bright red, forming a massive tsunami of flames a hundred feet high. The tops of the flames were so intense with heat they turned blue. I heard sirens finally approach in the distance, but they were not on our road! They were on Wildcat Canyon Road. The fire trucks were too wide for the narrow spidery road that fed our row of houses.

We had to get out, and we had no time to waste.

I heard Paul screaming for Mother upstairs and his light footsteps padded toward the master bathroom. I scampered up the stairs. Paul’s screaming stopped.

“Mom?” I heard him ask.

Paul was staring into the bathtub. Mother was fully clothed in her blue dress and Birkenstocks underneath the running shower. The water hit the fuzzy patch on her skull where her hair was growing back, then ran down the side of her face. Her temple was blackened and bleeding. They’d been fighting again. I could tell even with the running water down her face that she was not crying. Her eyes were still, with a deadened, withdrawn listlessness.

“Mom,” Paul repeated, reaching out to hold her wet hand, “There’s a fire. We need to leave.”

Mother did not lift her eyes.

“Please?” he asked.

The power suddenly cut out. The sound of the baseball game stopped.

“What the hell is smoking?” we heard my father roar from downstairs.

Apparently the beast had stirred.

At the sound of Father’s voice, Mother’s eyes darted back to life. She grabbed Paul’s hand and turned off the water. Smoke was starting to enter our windows. I ran to the bedroom and looked out the window.

The roof of the first house closest to the park was afire. The old wooden shingles curled up in the heat as all the dead orange pine needles that had settled between the cracks caught fire. Since the neighbors who lived in it were away with their daughter for the week, no one would even attempt to protect it.

The house between the burning one and ours belonged to the Morrows. I could see Mr. and Mrs. Morrow running back and forth between their garage and their blue station wagon with their arms full of computers. Personal computers were only just coming into their own, and in his garage Mr. Morrow had stored prototypes of his new computer which he hoped would compete with an emerging new company known as Apple. Rather than locate and save their two calico cats that Paul and I had helped raise since they were tiny, the Morrows desperately loaded their future into the rear of their station wagon. I was devastated that they’d leave their calicos to burn.

But I also knew exactly where the cats would hide.

Between the Morrow’s house and our kitchen was their large aqua-blue concrete and plaster swimming pool, propped on thick wooden stilts resting on deep cement pylons. Because our father wanted nothing to do with pets, Paul and I would always rendezvous with Morrow’s cats underneath their swimming pool. We’d bring leftover food to them. The shade under the pool was cool, and the earth was soft. The calicos would be there. Paul and I would save them if the Morrows would not.