Desert Places: A Novel of Terror (7 page)

15

I
filled the beginning of October with crisp, clear days on Lake Norman and unbearable nights in my bed. I fished off my pier for an hour each morning and evening. And in the early afternoons, I’d swim, diving beneath the murky blue water, now holding a cool bite with the approach of winter. Sometimes, I’d swim naked just for the freedom of it, like a child in a cold womb, unborn, unknowing. Nearing the surface after a deep dive, I’d pretend that hideous knowledge buried in the recesses of my mind would vanish when I broke into the golden air.
It’s only real underwater,
I’d think, rising from the lake bottom.
The air will cleanse me.

Dawdling on the end of my pier late one afternoon, nursing a Jack and Sun-Drop, I watched a bobber swaying on the surface of the lake. Early Octobers in North Carolina are perfection, and the sky turned azure as the sun edged toward the horizon. I’d been holding a fishing rod, waiting for the red-and-white bobber to duck beneath the water, when I heard footsteps swishing through the grass.

Setting the rod down, I looked back toward the shore and saw Walter step onto the pier. He wore sunglasses and a wheat-colored suit, his jacket thrown over his left shoulder, tie loosened.

For two weeks, I’d been home. Though he called often, I’d spoken to Walter only twice, and the conversations had been vapid on my part. Each time I’d hung up as soon as possible, revealing nothing of my May disappearance and shying away from his questions. Solitude and self-oblivion had been my sole desire, and as I watched my best friend stroll down the pier, his face sullen, I knew I’d hurt him.

Several feet away, he stopped and tossed a manila envelope onto the sun-bleached wood. Walter looked down at me, and I could see myself in his sunglasses. He sat down beside me on the edge of the pier, and our legs dangled out over the water.

“Your novel’s selling well,” he said. “I’m happy for you.”

“It’s a relief.”

As I fumbled with the envelope, Walter said, “I never opened it.”

“You don’t have to tell me that.”

“Something’s on your line.” I grabbed my rod and yanked it back, but the bobber resurfaced without tension in the line. When I reeled it back in, the bobber didn’t move.

“Shit, he was big. That was a large-mouth.” I tossed the rod onto the pier and picked up my drink. “Come on,” I said, standing up. Though the air was mild, the long day of direct sunlight had turned the surface of the pier as hot as summer concrete. It toasted the soles of my feet. “Let’s go inside. I’ll get you a beer.”

In swimming trunks, I ran up the pier toward the shore, leapt into the grass, and waited. Walter came along sluggishly, his usual pace. We walked together up through the yard, a narrow green slope rising from the shore to the house. I hadn’t mown the grass in two weeks, so it rose several inches above my ankles, a soft, dense carpet.

As we climbed the steps to the deck, I glanced into the woods on my right. I thought of the corpse buried out there, the one that had flung my life into this disarray. For a moment, I relived finding her—the smell, the fear, the rush of discovery.

Inside, I got Walter a bottle of beer out of the fridge and led him into the living room. Not quite as soused as I wanted to be, I mixed another Jack and Sun-Drop as he lay down on the sofa.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been over,” I said from the wet bar.

“Book tour wore you out, huh?”

“Just wasn’t in the mood to be in front of people constantly. To be
on
all the time.” After dropping several shards of ice into the glass and filling it half with citrus soda, half with bourbon, I stirred my drink, walked into the living room, and sat down in the tan leather chair across from Walter.

His eyes caught on
Brown No. 2,
looking down on us from above the fireplace in all its pretentious glory. He smirked, but the tension between us made him withhold comment.

“I know,” I said, “A real piece of shit. Loman. I’d like to kick that fucker’s ass. Don’t know why I leave it up there. It’s not like it’s growing on me. Fact, I hate it more every day.”

“Deep down, he must’ve known he was a hack. Had to. Should’ve listened to me, man.”

“I know, I know.” I yawned. I’d be passing out when Walter left. “How’s the fam?”

“Ah. The obligatory inquiry. They’re fine. I’ve been trying to spend more time with them lately. Less at the magazine. I’ve actually gotta be at a school play in two hours. Thirty six-year-olds on a stage. Can you imagine?”

“What are they doing?”

“Mamet.” We laughed. We always laughed when we were together. “Poor thing—Jenna’s so nervous about it. She got into bed with Beth and me last night, crying. We fell asleep comforting her. Woke up in a puddle.”

“Ooh,” I shuddered. “The thrill of parenthood. I’d miss it for the world.”

“You serious?” Walter asked, kicking off his wing tips and balancing the bottle on his chest.

“Hell yeah. Everybody feels sorry for me when I tell them I don’t wanna get married or have kids. But it’s not like pathetic resignation. I just happen to know for a fact that there isn’t a single person out there I’d wanna wake up beside day in and day out. Except you, of course. I’d marry you, Walter. Seriously.”

He laughed kindly. “Karen did a number on you, but you won’t always feel bitter.”

“How the hell do you know how I’m always gonna feel?”

“’Cause it’s impossible for someone to go through life without repeatedly falling in love.”

How sad. He really thinks I want his life. He thinks I’m Gatsby to his Daisy. Maybe I am.

“I was in love with Karen,” I said, and a lump swelled in my throat, but I stifled it. “Where did that get me? So I loved her and thought I wanted to spend my life with her. For two years, I felt this way, and suddenly, she didn’t, and wanted nothing to do with me. Not even friendship. Said I was a phase. A fucking phase. That’s two years of my life wasted. I think about what I could’ve written during that time—fucking irks me.” I shook my head and sipped the soured citrus soda. “I’ll tell you—it’ll be a genuine miracle if I ever do get married, ’cause I’m not looking for it. I just don’t think it’ll happen, and after two years of Karen—hell, I’m fine with that. I make a great mate.”

“You bit into a bad apple, and now you think all apples taste that way, but they don’t,” he said with the swagger of someone who knows they’re right.

“Maybe some people just like the taste of rotten apples.” His face dropped. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m being an asshole. I’m just a little shit-faced right now.”

“Hey, people go through phases. Be glad you aren’t a full-time asshole like Bill York.”

“That prick’s still your copyeditor?”

“Yep. He’s such a dick. He was giving me shit today for leaving early.”

“You run the magazine. Fire him.”

“If he wasn’t such a good editor, I’d have canned his ass a long time ago. But I don’t pay him to be a decent human being. Long as he keeps the text grammatically perfect, he can be the Prince of Darkness.”

“God, I admire your principle.” We laughed again. There was a brief period of silence, but because it followed laughter, it elapsed unstrained. Walter looked up at me from his beer.

“Andy,” he said, “wanna tell me what’s going on?”

I looked into Walter’s eyes, and I wanted to spill everything. The urge to tell another human being where I’d been and what I’d done was overwhelming.

“I just don’t know.”

“It has to do with that trip you took last May?”

I held my breath, thinking. “I guess you could say that.”

“Is it taxes?” he asked. “You in trouble with the IRS? That’s no shit.”

“Of course not.” I laughed.

“What can’t you trust me with?” His eyes narrowed, and I shrugged. “So talk to me.”

“You willing to chance prison, or your personal safety, to know what happened to me?”

He sat up and set his half-empty bottle on the floor. “I know you’d do it for me.”

My stomach contracted at the thought of the desert. I finished my drink and looked into his hazel eyes. His gray hair had grown out considerably since May. “You know I have a twin?”

“You’ve mentioned it. He disappeared, right?”

“We were twenty. Just walked out of our dorm room one night. Said, ‘You won’t see me for a while.’”

“Bet that was hard.”

“Yeah, it
was
hard. He contacted me last May. Walter, you can’t tell anyone. Not Beth, not—”

“Who am I going to tell?”

“You remember that black teacher who went missing last spring?”

“Rita Jones?”

I swallowed.
You say it now, he’s involved. Think about it. You’re too hammered to make this decision.

“She’s buried in my woods.” Walter’s face blanched. “My brother, Orson, put her there. He blackmailed me. Told me my blood was all over her and that the knife he killed her with was hidden in my house. Swore he’d call the police if I didn’t come see him. Threatened my mother.”

“You’re drunk.”

“Wanna see the body?”

Walter stared at me, eyes laced with doubt. “He killed her?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“He’s a psychopath,” I said, steadying my hands.

“What’d he want with you?” Tears welled up in my eyes, and I couldn’t stop them. They spilled down my cheeks, and as I wiped them away and looked up at Walter, my eyes filled again.

“Horrible,” I said, my lips quivering as tears ran over them and down my chin.

“Where’d you go?”

“The Wyoming desert.”

“Why?” I didn’t answer him, and Walter allowed me a moment to regain my composure. He didn’t ask why again. “Where is he now?”

“I don’t know. Could be anywhere in the country.”

“You never went to the police?”

“He threatened my mother!” My voice rose into the second floor. “Besides, what would I say? ‘My twin brother killed Rita Jones and buried her in my backyard. Oh, by the way, my blood’s all over her, she was murdered with my paring knife, and my brother’s disappeared, but I swear I didn’t do it!’”

“What other choice do you have?” he asked. I shrugged. “Well, if what you’re saying is true, people will continue to die until he’s caught. It could be Beth or John David next. That doesn’t concern you?”

“What concerns me,” I said, “is that even if I could find Orson, haul him into a precinct, and tell the detectives what he’d done, Orson would walk out the free man. I have no proof, Walter. It means shit in a court of law that
I
know Orson is a psychopath, that
I’ve
seen him torture and murder. What matters is that Rita Jones is covered in my blood.”

“You’ve seen him murder?” Walter asked. “Actually watched him kill?” Tears came to my eyes again. “Who did he—”

“I don’t wanna talk about it anymore.”

“But you’re telling me you—”

“I won’t talk about it!” Leaving the chair, I walked to the window, which looked across the lawn and, farther down, the lake. On the forest’s edge, yellow poplars had begun to turn gold, and scarlet oaks and red maples would soon set the woods ablaze with their dying leaves. My forehead against the window, my tears streaked down the glass, leaving blurry trails in their wake.

“What can I do?” Walter asked, his voice gentle again.

I shook my head.
I murdered, too. Cut out a woman’s heart and shot a man in the head, because Orson told me to.
The words ricocheted inside my head, but I couldn’t tell Walter what I’d done. Somehow, I thought it’d be enough that he knew about Orson and where I’d been.

“I have nightmares every night. I can’t write. The things I saw…”

“You have to talk to someone. Something like this could fuck you over for—”

“I’m talking to you,” I said, watching a boat drag an inner tube across the lake and wondering what really was coursing through Walter’s mind.

He came to the window, and we both leaned against the glass.

“She’s right out there,” I said, pointing toward the woods. “In a shallow grave.”

We stood for ages by the window. I thought he might push for more details, but he kept the silence, and I was grateful.

It was soon time for him to leave. He had his daughter’s play to attend. I pictured Jenna onstage, Walter and Beth in the audience, beaming. I swear it only lasted a second, but I was gorged with envy.

16

J
EANETTE
Thomas lived alone in a dying neighborhood in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in the same ranch-style house where her sons had grown up and her husband had died. It had been a thriving middle-class neighborhood when I was a child, but now as I drove my red CJ-7 slowly along Race Street, I marveled at how the area had changed. Rusted chain-link fences enclosed the yards, and some of the homes were derelict. It seemed as if an elderly person sat in a rocking chair on every front porch, waving at the infrequent cars that passed through. This neighborhood served as the final zone of independence for many of its residents, most only several years from a nursing home existence.

Approaching my mother’s house, I couldn’t help but ruminate on what this place had once been. In my childhood, kids had filled the streets, and I saw them now, riding bicycles and scrap-wood contraptions, laughing, fighting, chasing the ice-cream truck as it made the rounds on a sweltering summer afternoon. A wonderland, shrouded in shady green trees and electric with youthful energy, it had been mine and Orson’s world. We’d climbed its trees, navigated the cool darkness of the drainage ditches, and explored the forbidden woods that bordered the north side of the neighborhood. We’d formed secret clubs, constructed rickety tree houses, and smoked our first cigarette here on a deserted baseball diamond one winter night. Because it was the only home of my childhood, the memories were thick and staggering. They overcame me every time I returned, and now that this neighborhood had become a ghost town, my childhood felt far more spectacular. The present listless decay made my memories rich and resplendent.

My mother always parked her car at the bottom of the driveway so she wouldn’t back over the mailbox. When I saw her car edged slightly into the street, I smiled and parked near the curb in front of her house. I cut off the Jeep and opened the door to the grating whine of a leaf blower. Stepping outside, I slammed the door.

Across the street, an old man sat in a chair on his front porch, smoking a pipe and watching a crew of teenagers blow the leaves on his lawn into a brown pile. He waved to me, and I waved back.
Mr. Harrison. We were twelve when we learned about your subscription to
Playboy.
Stole the magazine for three consecutive months. Checked your mailbox every day for its delivery when we got home from school. You caught us the fourth month. Peeped from behind your curtain for a whole week, waiting to identify the thieves. Came tearing out of the house, fully intent on dragging us to our mother, until you realized she’d know you were a dirty old man. “Well, you got three of ’em already!” you shouted, then whispered, “I’ll leave ’em on my back porch when I’m through. How about that? At least let me get my money’s worth.” That was fine by us.

“Hey!” a man shouted from a gray Honda that had stopped in the middle of the street. I stepped back down off the curb and walked toward the car.

“Can I help you with something?” I asked. I placed him at twenty-six or twenty-seven. His hair was very black, and his razor-thin face was baby ass–smooth and white. The interior of his car reeked of Windex. I didn’t like his eyes.

“Are you Andrew Thomas?” he asked.

Here we go.

Since the publication of my first novel, I’d kept a running count—excluding conferences, literary festivals, and other publicized appearances, this was the thirty-third time I’d been recognized.

I nodded. “No way! I’m reading your book right now. Um,
The Incinerator
—no, ah, I know what it’s called.…”

“
The Scorcher
.”

“That’s it. I love it. In fact, I’ve got it with me. Do you think that, um, that…”

“Would you like for me to sign it?”

“Would you?”

“Be happy to.” He reached onto the floorboard in the back, grabbed my newest hardcover, and handed it to me.
I guess I just look like I have a pen on me.
Sometimes it was disappointing meeting the fans. “You got a pen?” I asked.

“Shit, I don’t—oh, wait.” He opened the glove compartment and retrieved a short, dull pencil. He’d played miniature golf recently. As I took the pencil, I glanced at the jacket of
The Scorcher
—an evil smiling face, consumed in flames. I hadn’t been particularly pleased with this jacket design, but no one cares what the author thinks.

“You want me just to sign it?” I asked.

“Could you do it to …sign it to my girlfriend?”

“Sure.”
Are you gonna tell me her name, or do I have to ask? …I have to ask.
“What’s her name?”

“Jenna.”

“J-E-N-N-A?”

“Yep.” I set my book on the roof of his car and scribbled her name and one of the three dedications I always use: “To Jenna—may your hands tremble and your heart pound. Andrew Z. Thomas.” I closed the book and returned it. “She’s gonna love this,” he said, shifting the car back into drive. “Thank you so much.” I shook his cold, thin hand and stepped back over the curb.

As he drove away, I walked through my mother’s uncut grass toward the front door. A gusty wind passed through the trees and tickled my spine. The morning sky was overcast, filled with bumpy mattresslike clouds, which in the coming months might be filled with snow. In the center of her lawn, against the ashen late-October sky, a silver maple exploded in burnt orange.

As I continued through the grass, the appearance of her house grew dismal. Beginning to pull away from the roof, the gutters overflowed with leaves, and the siding had peeled and buckled. Even the yard had turned into a jungle, and I didn’t doubt Mom had fired the lawn service I’d hired for her. She’d been infuriatingly stubborn in her refusal to accept any degree of financial assistance. I’d tried to buy her a new house after
The Killer and His Weapon
was sold to Hollywood, but she refused. She wouldn’t let me pay her bills, buy her a car, or even send her on a cruise. Whether it was her pride or just ignorance concerning how much money I made, I wasn’t sure, but it irritated me to no end. She insisted on scraping by with Social Security, her teacher’s pension, and the tiny chunk of Dad’s life insurance, now almost gone.

I stepped up onto the front porch and rang the doorbell. Bob Barker’s voice from
The Price Is Right
escaped through a cracked window. I heard my mother dragging a stool across the floor so she could reach the peephole.

“It’s me, Mom,” I said through the door.

“Andrew, is that you?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Three dead bolts turned, and it opened.

“Darling!” Her face brightened—a cloud unveiling the sun. “Come in,” she said, smiling. “Give your mom a hug.” I stepped inside and we embraced. At sixty-five, she seemed to grow smaller every time I visited. Her hair was turning white, but she wore it long, as she always had, pulled back in a ponytail. Though too big for her now, a green dress dotted with white flowers hung upon her feeble frame like outdated wallpaper.

“You look good,” she said, inspecting my waist. “I see you lost that spare tire.” Smiling, she pinched my stomach. She had a paralyzing fear I’d suddenly gain six hundred pounds and become trapped in my house. It was hell being around her if I was the slightest bit overweight. “I told you it wouldn’t take much to lose those love handles. They’re really not attractive, you know. That’s what happens when you spend all your time inside, writing.”

“The yard doesn’t look good, Mom,” I said, walking into the living room and sitting down on the sofa. She walked to the television and turned the volume all the way down. “Is that lawn service not coming anymore?”

“I fired them,” she said, blocking the screen, hands on her hips. “They charged too much.”

“You weren’t paying for it.”

“I don’t need your help,” she said. “And I’m not gonna argue with you about it. I wrote a check to you for the money you gave me. Remind me to give it to you before you leave.”

“I won’t take it.”

“Then the money will go to waste.”

“But the yard looks terrible. It needs to be—”

“That grass is gonna turn brown and die anyway. No need to make a fuss about it now.”

I sighed and leaned back against the dusty, sunken sofa as my mother disappeared into the kitchen. The house smelled of must, aged wood, and tarnished silverware. Above the brick fireplace hung a family portrait that had been taken the summer after Orson and I graduated from high school. The picture was sixteen years old, and it showed. The background had reddened, and our faces looked more pink than flesh-colored.

I remembered the day distinctly. Orson and I had fought about who would wear Dad’s brown suit. We’d both become fixated on it, so Mom had flipped a dime, and I won. Furious, Orson had refused to have his picture taken, so Mom and I went alone to the photographer’s studio. I wore my father’s brown suit, and she wore a purple dress, black now in the discolored photograph. It was eerie to look at my mother and myself standing there alone, with the plain red background behind us, half a family.
Sixteen years later, nothing has changed.

She came back into the living room from the kitchen, carrying a glass of sweet tea.

“Here you are, darling,” she said, handing me the cold, sweaty glass. I took a sip, savoring her ability to brew the best tea I’d ever tasted. It held the perfect sweetness—not bitter, not weak, and the color was transparent mahogany. She sat down in her rocking chair and pulled a quilt over her skinny legs, the wormy veins hidden by fleshy panty hose.

“Why haven’t you come in four months?” she asked.

“I’ve been busy, Mom,” I said, setting the tea down on a glass coffee table in front of the couch. “I had the book tour and other stuff, so I haven’t been back in North Carolina that long.”

“Well, it hurts my feelings that my son won’t take time out of his high-and-mighty schedule to come visit his mother.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I really feel bad.”

“You should be more considerate.”

“I will. I’m sorry.”

“Stop saying that,” she snapped. “I forgive you.” Then turning back to the television, she said, “I bought your book.”

“You didn’t have to buy it, Mom. I have thirty copies at home. I could’ve brought one.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“You read it?”

She frowned, and I knew the answer. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings,” she said, “but it’s just like your other ones. I didn’t even reach the end of the first chapter before I put it down. You know I can’t stand profanity. And that Sizzle was just horrible. I’m not gonna read about a man going around setting people on fire. I don’t know how you write it. People probably think I abused you.”

“Mom, I—”

“I know you write what sells, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m gonna like it. I just wish you’d write something nice for a change.”

“Like what? What would you like for me to write?”

“A love story, Andrew. Something with a happy ending. People read love stories, too, you know.”

I laughed out loud and lifted up the glass. “So you think I should switch to romance? My fans would love that, let me tell you.”

“Now you’re just being ugly,” she said as I sipped the tea. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Mocking your own mother.”

“I’m not mocking you, Mom. I think you’re hilarious.”

She frowned again and looked back at the television. Though strong-willed and feisty, my mother was excruciatingly sensitive beneath her fussy exterior.

“Have you been to Dad’s grave yet?” she asked after a moment.

“No. I wanted to go with you.”

“There were flowers by the headstone this morning. A beautiful arrangement. It looked fresh. You sure you didn’t—”

“Mom, I think I’d know if I laid flowers on Dad’s grave this morning.”

Her short-term memory was wilting. She’d probably taken the flowers there yesterday.

“Well, I was there this morning,” she said. “Before it clouded up. Sat there for about an hour, talking to him. He’s got a nice spot under that magnolia.”

“Yes, he does.”

Staring into the olive shag carpet beneath my feet, at the sloped dining room table next to the kitchen, and that first door in the hallway leading down into the basement, I sensed the four of us moving through this dead space, this antiquated haunt—felt my father and Orson as strongly as I did my mother, sitting in the flesh before me. Strangely enough, it was the smell of burned toast that moved me. My mother loved scorched bread, and though the scent of her singed breakfast was now a few hours old, it made this deteriorating house my home, and me her little boy again, for three inexorable seconds.

“Mom,” I began, and I almost said his name.
Orson
was on the tip of my tongue. I wanted her to remind me that we’d been carefree children once, kids who’d played.

She looked up from the muted television.

But I didn’t ask. She’d driven him from her mind. When I’d made the mistake of talking about him before, she had instantly shut down. It crushed her that he’d left, that thirteen years ago Orson had severed all ties from our family. Initially, she dealt with that pain by denying he’d ever been her son. Now, years later, that he’d ever been born.

“Never mind,” I said, and she turned back to the game show. So I found a memory for myself.
Orson and I are eleven, alone in the woods. It’s summertime, the trees laden with leaves. We find a tattered canvas tent, damp and mildewed, but we love it. Brushing out the leaves from inside, we transform it into our secret fort, playing there every day, even in the rain. Since we never tell any of the neighborhood kids, it’s ours alone, and we sneak out of the house at night on several occasions and camp there with our flashlights and sleeping bags, hunting fireflies until dawn. Then, running home, we climb into bed before Mom or Dad wakes up. They never catch us, and by summer’s end, we have a jelly jar full of prisoners—a luciferin night-light on the toy chest between our beds.

Mom and I sat watching the greedy contestants until noon. I kept the memory to myself.

“Andrew,” she said when the show had ended, “is it still cold outside?”