Murder on the Mind (4 page)

Brenda and I didn’t talk much during the sorting ordeal. She’d hold up an item and I’d give her a yea or a nay. It wasn’t long before the nay pile stretched three times higher than the yea pile. Luckily the garbage men would be around the next day.

Later, feeling weak and sick, I watched Brenda make my bed before she retreated. Napping on my own comfortable mattress gave me my first taste of security since the mugging.

When Brenda woke me for dinner, I staggered from my room like a drunk. Red wine accompanied the entree—corned beef and cabbage.

“What’s the occasion?” I asked, stifling a yawn.

“St. Patrick’s Day. Besides, it beats burgers any day,” Brenda said, placing a huge helping on my plate. “I bought Irish soda bread to go with it. Dig in.”

She served Richard and herself and they started eating. I poked at the cabbage with my fork.

Richard swallowed. “Something wrong?”

“The night I got mugged, I’d been with friends at a pub.” I pushed a potato around. “Nobody came to the hospital. Nobody called.”

They stopped in mid-bite, glancing at each other. “Maybe they didn’t know.” Brenda reached over, clasped my hand. “You’ll make new friends, hon.”

They spent the rest of the evening cooking up plans to paint my room, trying to cheer me. I should’ve felt flattered, but the attention only depressed me. I wanted to be left alone.

By the time I said good-night, they looked more exhausted than I felt.

Darkness shrouded the cold, dank room, the atmosphere charged with dread. Fatigue weighed me down so I could hardly stand. Something nudged me from the side. I turned, hands outstretched to stop its gentle swaying motion. My fingers probed the softness, tried to curl into the lingering warmth, but the hairs were too short.

Hairs?

I fumbled in the darkness until encountering a sticky warmth—blood? Its sickly sweetness turned my stomach. Startled, I backed away until I could make out the still form in the shadowy room. A ten-point buck, dressed out—its genitals and internal organs discarded—and hanging to bleed. Its lifeless, glassy eyes bored into my own.

The back of my throat closed. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t scream, as a wave of horror and triumph engulfed me, obliterating all rationality and what was left of my sense of self.

I awoke, nausea nearly choking me, stumbled to the bathroom, and vomited. I sat, heaving, my head threatening to explode. Spent, I collapsed onto the cold linoleum. This had been no dream. This time I had stood alongside the dead buck, felt and smelled its death tang.

I couldn’t stop trembling. I couldn’t tell Richard something was terribly wrong. Not yet. Not when I had no understanding of what was happening to me.

* * *

Friday morning the three of us drove to one of those big franchise hardware stores to choose paint, and buy brushes and drop cloths.

It felt good to be out among normal people, people who weren’t sick—who hadn’t had their brains bruised. There seemed to be a lot of them out and about. Retired men, women with small children, young adults choosing wallpaper, paint, vacuum cleaners. . . . Didn’t any of these people work?

While Richard and Brenda debated the merits of natural versus synthetic paintbrush bristles, I strolled down aisles filled with build-it-yourself furniture, nails, screws, garden tools, and everything in between, until I landed in front of the rope and chain display. Synthetic and natural fibers came in various lengths and widths, prepackaged or ready to cut on large spools.

I crouched by a spool of Manila rope, half-inch width, by twelve hundred feet. The hemp felt splintery between my fingers. So . . . familiar. When I pressed it to my nose, the image of an old, dank, wooden shed or garage filled my mind.

In my dream the hanging deer had swung in a gentle, easy arc, but the light had come from a different angle. . . .

I turned the rope over and over in my hand.

“Can I help you, sir?” asked an acne-scarred young man.

I dropped the rope and straightened. “No. Just looking, thanks.”

As he walked away, I turned my attention back to the spool. The rope meant something, but I wasn’t sure what.

“Oh, there you are!” Brenda said, coming up behind me. “Which one of these color chips do you like?”

We started painting after lunch, though my broken arm kept me from doing much. After several hours of bad jokes and insults, the room looked better. The paint fumes aggravated my headache, so I ended up sleeping on the living room couch.

My mind stayed on a circular track. What the hell was happening inside my head? The dreams and hallucinations were too real.

Then it came to me. A brain tumor. Caused by the severe blow to my skull.

What else could it be?

I stole into Richard’s study, flipped through his medical texts until I found the symptoms. Yes, I suffered from drowsiness, lethargy, personality changes, impaired mental faculties.

I was going to die.

Awake half the night with worry, I wondered if I should draw up a will . . . then I remembered I had nothing of value to leave to anyone.

Richard and Brenda slept late. Brenda later told me it was a Saturday morning tradition for them to have a huge breakfast and skip lunch. Richard and I sat at the kitchen table while she made toast, then chopped vegetables and grated cheese for omelets. I waited for a conversational opening, but Richard buried his nose in the newspaper.

“Uh, Rich. I—I haven’t been sleeping well.”

He barely looked up from the sports section. “You’re in a new place. Give yourself a few days.” He continued reading an article on the Buffalo Sabres, absently grabbing a slice of toast from his plate.

“No . . . I mean, not since the mugging.”

Richard looked up again, swallowing. “I can’t prescribe something to help you sleep. I won’t.”

“That’s not what I mean. What could make a person not sleep?”

He shrugged. “Anything weighing on your mind.”

“Could someone with this kind of brain injury get a . . . a tumor?”

He folded the newspaper, setting it aside. “First of all, it would take months before you’d even notice symptoms. I looked at your x-rays and, believe me, I called in the best for consultation. It’s my professional opinion that you’re going to be just fine. What you need now is rest, time to recover.”

I took a deep breath. Richard was a good doctor. But. . . .

“Then I don’t understand it, because I don’t feel the same any more. I’m . . . different.”

“Of course you are; you suffered a trauma—” Brenda piped in.

I shook my head. “No. I don’t mean the mugging. I mean I’m different.”

Hadn’t Richard said the same thing?

He pushed the paper aside, eyes narrowing. “How?”

“I’ve been having these weird dreams.”

Brenda looked up from her cutting board, but said nothing.

“The nightmare you mentioned in the hospital?” Richard asked.

“Yeah, that’s when it started. I keep dreaming about a deer.”

“A deer?”

I forced myself to continue. “It’s a bow kill, and it’s hanging in a garage to bleed. But there’re all these weird emotions tied to it: triumph, horror. Every time I dream about it, the emotions get stronger. One time it’ll be a perverse sense of satisfaction, then it’ll be absolute terror.”

Richard frowned. “I’m not a psychiatrist, but it could just be a reaction to being mugged. You were a victim, like the deer. You could’ve died.”

“But that’s not the worst of it. It’s not just a dream any more. I’ve been having—” God. No going back once I said the word: “Hallucinations. When I’m wide awake.”

Richard’s stare went right through me.

“I might see it, feel it, smell it,” I continued. “I live it. This thing—this deer—is hanging. In a garage. It’s slit from stem to stern. And its eyes—”

I closed my own, remembering that nauseating, oppressive dread. “They’re open and they’re glassy and they’re just so . . . dead. And whoever killed the buck feels tremendous triumph.”

Richard’s eyes were wide. Definitely no turning back now.

“I hear these words, over and over: ‘You prick, you goddamn prick,’ and. . . .” I let the words trail off.

“My God,” Brenda muttered, dropping her paring knife into the sink.

Richard squirmed. Maybe the thought of a brain tumor wasn’t so farfetched after all. “I don’t have any pull at UB Med Center, but I have a few friends here in town I can call. If it’ll make you feel better, we could—”

“No!” Brenda cried, diving for the newspaper. She thumbed through the thick pile, searching. “Didn’t you see the headline? Weren’t you listening to the news?” she said, her eyes wild. She spread the front page of
The Buffalo News
out across the kitchen table before us. The banner screamed: Businessman Found Dead in Bizarre Ritual Killing.

“What about it?” Richard asked.

“I heard it on the radio earlier. This guy was found in his own garage—eviscerated, hanging like a deer to bleed!”

Anxiety churned my gut.

“They’ve got no clues—nothing to go on,” she said.

“What’s that got to do with—?”

“Don’t you think it’s the least bit unusual that Jeffy has a dream—?”

“Don’t start with that psychic stuff again,” Richard warned her. “He just said it was a deer.”

I wasn’t listening.

Psychic?

Pure, blind panic hit me.

I wanted to puke.

The image was back.

I rested my head in my good hand, covering my eyes.

A man, a hemp rope cutting into his throat, swayed as though in a gentle breeze, his neck twisted at an odd angle. Heavyset, about fifty-five or sixty, and naked. Rolls of fat hung like melted wax around his middle.

The rustle of paper stopped. “Jeffy?” Brenda pointed to a coarse-screened, head-and-shoulders photo of a man dressed in a business suit.

“That’s him!”

“Who?” Richard asked.

“The man I saw hanging.”

“You said it was a deer.”

“No, I just saw him!”

“You had a vision, just now?” Brenda asked, excited.

I nodded. A vision. Much more acceptable than the product of a tumor, a nightmare, or an hallucination.

Brenda settled the paper on the table between us and started reading aloud. “Local businessman Matthew J. Sumner was found hanged Friday in his garage. The grisly scene. . . .”

My fears about tumors instantly vanished. The murder took place somewhere else. In a field. I knew it had. I’d seen it. The deer must have represented this guy. My mind had given me a vision of something I could understand.

How
the hell did it do that?

Why
the hell did it do that?

And why had it started more than a week before the murder took place—when I was in a city more than four hundred miles away?

I skimmed through the story, desperate to find out the facts. But the police were giving out few details.

According to the M.E., the Bison Bank vice president had been slain sometime late Thursday afternoon or early evening. Sumner was found hanging from a rafter in his own garage; his Cadillac Seville was missing. He’d been killed somewhere else, as evidenced by the marks on the body and lack of blood at the scene. His wife found him late Friday afternoon. She’d been visiting friends in Palm Beach the previous week. Funeral services were to be announced later.

I looked up. Richard’s grim gaze remained fixed on me.

“This explains everything!”

“Calm down,” he said.

“But I’ve got to do something about this.”

“What?” He exploded from his chair to pace the floor. “What do you think you could possibly do?”

“I . . . don’t know. But don’t you see, it means I’m not crazy. I’m not—”

It didn’t mean I wasn’t crazy. I sounded crazy even to myself. Smoothing the newsprint, I stared at the photo of the dead man. He looked familiar.

Richard took his seat, his right hand methodically massaging his clenched left fist. “Jeff,” he began, his tone reasonable—his physician’s voice. “A head injury like yours can cause all kinds of problems. Make you believe all kinds of things.”

“You mean I can’t trust what I think? What I know?”

“It’s something you should consider.”

I continued to stare at the news story, read it over and over again, my conviction growing deeper with each new reading.

The tension in that kitchen was nearly unbearable. Finally Richard headed for the door.

“Where are you going?” Brenda asked.

“For a walk, before I say something we’ll all regret.”

Brenda watched him go, looked after him for a long moment. Then she took out the plastic wrap and started putting away the chopped vegetables.

“You believe me, don’t you, Brenda?”

She nodded solemnly.