Malus Domestica (31 page)

Click. Click. Click. Click.
The clock on the kitchen wall ticked. Wind rushed against the side of the house, breaking like a tide. A few birds sang outside, distant and muffled through the walls.

Katie sniffed wetly.

Taking out the ring, Wayne put it to his eye and peered through it. To his relief, the kitchen and the table in it remained the same.

“I don’t—”

Hhhhrrrrrrooooooo!
An eerie howling sound came from the living room, pouring ice down his spine.

Two heartbeats later, the front door slammed shut.
BLAM!

Katie and Amanda both screamed, running for the front door and wrenching it open. Wayne limped along right behind them, toting his crutch like a briefcase, and all three children sprinted out onto the grass. They were halfway across the front lawn when Pete yelled after them.

“It was the wind, you idiots!” He stood on the porch, waving the tire iron. “The wind blew the door shut!”

❂

Once Pete had talked them back in, they went about their search for Owlhead (as they’d taken to calling it) with a little more levity, sweeping each room. Wayne would throw open a door and Pete would step in, the tire iron up in both fists like a Jedi with a lightsaber. By the time they had canvassed the entire house, they were up in the cupola and in pretty calm spirits.

“You can see everything up here,” said Amanda, her nose almost touching the north window. “I can even see my house, and Pete’s. They’re both in the back of Chevalier Village.”
Sha-vall-yay,
she said it, as if it were some kind of fine wine.

“Where’s
my
house?” asked Katie, climbing up onto the wide sill.

“Right behind that one.” Amanda braced her with a hand, pointing through the glass at a little white terrier sitting by the drive to the Alamo house. “Be careful, don’t lean against the window. See Champ down there, layin in the grass?”

“Yep!”

Pete was staring out the opposite window. He climbed up and crouched on the sill, the top of his head against the arch of the windowframe. “Hey, I didn’t realize you could see the fairgrounds from here.”

“Really?” Wayne joined him.

Rising over the forest far to the south were the tallest buildings of Blackfield, tiny windowed spikes jutting up from the trees. The huge thirteen-floor Blackfield University Library scraping sky way in the back. The sand-colored cathedral spires of Walker Memorial. The nameless twelve-story office building with the fire-damaged penthouse floor. Much closer, off to his left, Wayne could see the suggestion of shapes just visible over the leaves and scraggly black trees—the highest hump of a roller-coaster, the peak of a free-fall tower. A smear of color that might be the front of the funhouse.

“We were that close?” he asked, marveling. They had certainly walked a long way home…and they’d almost made it.

“Yep.” Pete climbed down and sat on the bed. “Man, those women that found us were creepy as hell. I’ve never seen them up close like that. That Theresa lady was strong.”

He flexed an arm and squeezed his bicep, speaking in a bad Russian accent. “Strong like bull.”

Amanda said over her shoulder,
“Yeah
she was. Super-strong for an old lady. She carried Wayne all the way down the fairground road out to the highway where the ambulance could find him.”

“Like a quarter of a mile.”

Turning on his TV and Playstation, Wayne sat next to him. A videogame started up and he went into a virtual garage, absent-mindedly cycling through customization options on the muscle car he’d been grooming all month. Anonymous rap-rock whispered from the speakers.

“That’s a badass Mustang,” said Pete.

“Thanks.” Wayne fiddled with the car some more, and then his curiosity finally nibbled at him a little too hard. “So that one lady…I think she said her name was Karen. She said she lives in the big house across the street.”

“All three of them do.” Getting down from the windowsill, Amanda sat in the floor in front of the TV with Katie and the two of them leafed through one of his comic books. It was a newer
Batman,
one of the New 52 and he’d read it a hundred times, so Wayne didn’t jump to its defense. “They all live in the same house together. They’re not sisters, though, I don’t think.” She cupped her hands over Katie’s ears and said, “People in Chevalier say they’re lesbians.”

Wayne’s forehead scrunched up and he looked to Pete for confirmation. The other boy shrugged as if to say,
It is what it is.

“She paid my whole hospital bill.”

Amanda looked up. “That was nice of her.”

“I think my dad said it was like thirty thousand dollars.”

Pete said in a dramatic movie-trailer voice, “Sweeeet Jesus.”

“Sweeeet Jeedzus,” echoed Katie. “Can I draw? Do you got any paper and crayons?”

“I think there’s some paper in my dad’s printer.” Wayne stared at the TV screen as he talked. The videogame was a balm to his nerves. “I don’t have any crayons, but my dad’s got some markers, if he didn’t leave em at school.” He handed the controller off to Pete and clomped downstairs. He was on the landing before he discovered two things: (1) he’d forgotten his crutch, and (2) he was by himself. Suddenly he felt very small and alone.

Luckily he didn’t have to go all the way to the first floor. Making his way down the hall, Wayne pushed the door to his father’s bedroom and watched it swing slowly open, revealing the room and everything it contained a couple inches at a time.

A tall wooden dresser from Aunt Marcelina…a window…Dad’s pressboard desk from Walmart…several liquor-store boxes still full of their stuff…a window…Dad’s bed….

No Owlhead looming in the corner.

Muscles slowly relaxed that he didn’t realize were locked solid. He remembered to breathe again.

It was going to be a long night.

16

L
UNCHTIME
TRAFFIC
SHUSHED
PAST
as Robin and Kenway ushered Joel onto the front porch of a Bungalow-style house, perched on a hill overlooking downtown Blackfield. Through the screen of trees below the house, Robin could see an ocean of rooftops.

Instead of dropping him off, they stopped by to pick up some clean clothes. Kenway didn’t seem to mind playing chauffeur all day; he didn’t have anything better to do, especially since it was a Saturday.

“Hey, you wouldn’t mind checkin the place out for me, would you, hero?” asked Joel, unlocking the door.

The veteran looked like a barbarian as he climbed the front steps behind the line cook, six feet of blond hair and muscle crammed into a black T-shirt. He moved into the house and stood motionless in the foyer, listening, his fists clenched, his eyes wandering slowly over the old-fashioned decor and flowery wallpaper.

“So is—” began Robin, but Kenway held up a hand.

He checked behind the front door and pulled a baseball bat out of the umbrella stand, but paused in surprise when it sparkled in the sunlight. The striking end was covered in five-pointed stars made out of fake diamonds. “You Bedazzled a baseball bat?”

Joel shrugged sheepishly.

Shaking his head, Kenway stalked into the living room with the twinkling Slugger, and on into the kitchen. Joel went to his dish drain and pulled out a bread knife. Put the bread knife back, pulled out a silvery hammer. A meat tenderizer.

“You two stay here,” said Kenway, and he left through a doorway.

Robin scowled. “I can take care of myself, Major Dad. I’m probably more dangerous at hand-to-hand than you are. Did you forget the video I showed you so soon?”

“Nobody could forget
that,”
he replied from the hallway.

“What video?” asked Joel. “I ain’t seen no video.”

“I showed him the video of my first kill—the Witchlord of Alabama.”

“Huh. How many witches you done killed, anyway?”

“About twenty.”

“You killed twen-ty witches. Twennnnnty! Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah.”

She smirked at his impression of the Count.
“About
twenty. Nineteen. I’ve kicked the shit out of a lot more people than that, though.”

“You stone-cold, hooker.” Joel opened the fridge and took out a beer, opening it sabre-style with a single swipe of the meat tenderizer. He handed the bottle to Robin and opened another one for himself.

“Where’d you learn a trick like that?”

He smiled slyly. “I ain’t
always
been a pizza-boy.”

“Anyway,” Robin said, sitting down, “As I was going to say earlier, is this your mother’s house?”

“Yep. My brother Fish don’t like livin here, though. That’s why he moved into the back of his comic shop. He says this house reminds him too much of Mama.”

With its speckly-green Formica countertops and avocado appliances, the kitchen was a picture-perfect representation of what it must have looked like when Joel and Fish were boys. “She went a little crazy at the end. Lost her mind. She lived here for about a year, me here takin care of her, and then I eventually had to put her in the home. I couldn’t do it no more. She died there a year and four months later. Massive stroke.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“I think it must have been the witches that did it.” He took a swig of liquid lunch. “I don’t mean they put a spell on her or nothin, but it was…you know, her knowin they killed your mama Annie, she got real paranoid. She turned into a real basketcase. Used to say she saw demons in her closet. I’m so glad she didn’t do that when I was
little
little—can you imagine how much that would have jacked up a little boy?”

Kenway came back, the Bedazzled ball bat resting on his shoulder. He and Robin sat at the kitchen table as Joel put on fresh clothes—skinny jeans, black boots, and a spaghetti-strap top. He was tying a silk do-rag around his head when he came back, dragging a cloud of tart perfume.

“You should polish your boots,” said Kenway. “I used to wear some like that. I can show you how to spit-polish them so shiny you can see yourself in em.”

Joel looked down. “I’ll skip the spit, but I do appreciates ye.”

“So are we gonna go pick up his car by ourselves, or do we want to get a cop to follow us down there?” asked Robin.

“I fear for my car,” said Joel. “There ain’t no tellin what he’s done with it. But I fear for myself a little bit more. I think if I’m gonna go knockin on a serial killer’s door, I want a trigger-happy cop there with me.”

❂

The officer on duty at the police station took them into the break room and made a cup of coffee while Joel gave him a statement. Kenway and Robin sat at a hand-me-down trestle table from the local school that folded up in the middle and had attached stools.

“So you say he had you tied upside down by your feet,” the cop echoed for clarification.

Lieutenant Bowker was a tall, corn-fed man. The back of his neck cradled his shaved skull in a fat roll. Stirring his coffee, he came over to the table and sat down with a clipboard. “And he had another man tied up there? You say this killer was…collecting blood for a ‘garden’?”

“Yeah.” Joel sat with his fingers templed under his nose. The studs in his ears twinkled in the fluorescents.

“Now, are you
sure—”
Bowker lifted a sheet of paper to peek underneath, let it fall, “—that this wasn’t just some kind of sexual fetish game gone wrong? Maybe things got a little out of hand and maybe you misconstrued the, ahh, the situation, so to speak. I mean, people get roofied all the time, and stuff like this happens. Not to diminish that kind of thing, you know, but, ahh…murder is kind of in a whole nother ballpark.”

Joel had already detailed the series of events that had led to waking up in the garage—talking to B1GR3D online about dinner and sex, meeting him at his apartment, getting halfway through a steak and passing out.

He closed his eyes as if in restraint, and a few seconds later, opened them. “Yes. I’m more than sure it wasn’t a sex game.”

“Now, he, ahh…” Bowker wrote some more. “You said you escaped. How did you ‘escape’? Seems like it would be hard to get out of a hogtie like that. Especially in fuzzy cuffs.”

“I didn’t say the cuffs were fuzzy.”

“Ah, right.” Bowker crossed out some text.

“I squeezed one of my hands out the cuffs—they weren’t put on tight enough—and I got myself down while he was gone.” The cuffs themselves had, in reality, been removed with Kenway’s bolt cutters and were now rusting quietly at the bottom of the dumpster behind his studio. “I ran through the woods until I got to the road, where Mr. Kenway here found me.”

“What about the other man?” asked Bowker. “The other one that was tied up. You just left him there?”

“He was dead. There was nothing I could do.”

“How d’you know?”

“I knew because his throat was cut.” Joel drew a finger across his neck, and his voice became urgent, exasperated. “Blood was runnin up to the top of the motherfucker’s head
and drippin on the motherfuckin floor.”

Bowker leaned back warily. “Well now there ain’t no need to get excited, Mr. Ellis.”

“There ain’t—”
Joel stopped himself before he could become fully livid, and spoke in measured tones, bracketing each point with his hands. “I almost got
killed,
and you want to make a
joke
out of it because I’m gay
.
Ain’t you s’posed to protect and serve?” He sat up straight and boggled at some spot on the wall with a dazed look. “Oh, hell. I must’ve forgot where I was at. I’m black in a
got
-damn police station.” His eyes focused lasers of sarcasm on Bowker’s pink face. “What was
I
thinkin? Maybe I shoulda kept the cuffs on.”

The officer pursed his lips, flustered, his face darkening. He glanced over at Kenway and the American flag shirt taut across his broad chest.

“We ain’t got to go
there,
Mr. Ellis,” grunted Bowker. “I’m honestly tryin to help you in good faith. Now I don’t much care one way or the other what your proclivities are, and I’m real sorry that you must have got the wrong idea here.” He twiddled the inkpen between his stubby fingers and went back to writing, his tone hardening, losing that good-ol-boy apathy. “Can you tell me what this man looked like?”