Commonmind
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- Dec 31, 2006
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This is quite a bit long, and I apologize if it turns anyone off for length alone. First, if anyone has read King's On writing, they'll know what this is from. It is a speed piece, with no revisions, no checks for grammar and no real effort put in on my part to change what came out of me naturally. Please read it if you are willing to devote the time, if not I thank you for at least considering it. It is long, and has some language and sexual themes, so younglings please hit the back button (though that always inspired me not to, please do it nonetheless). If it comes off as cliche to anyone, that is because it is supposed to be...
As he turned the corner, Jon put foot to gas as heavily as he could without looking like a deranged loony hell-bent on running down the neighborhood kids playing hockey in the street. Home was calling, and it called with the sweet promise of silence and an afternoon of rest; not a precious minute of it could be wasted. Robert McCarthy was an unforgiving asshole of a man, but even he knew when someone was reaching their breaking point. Jon was the poster boy for ‘almost-there’ by the time the clock hit lunch.
With the afternoon away from the office and McCarthy’s mint-tinged breath, and little Laney off to her friend Melissa’s birthday hullabaloo, there was nothing more to do but enjoy some much needed peace and quiet. Maybe a good book would fit the bill. He couldn’t remember reading a lick since Karen had swaggered her way into his life, seducing him from the normal comforts of his routine with pillow-talk and red lace panties that always seemed to be made from nothing but a piece of string and a small white tag with washing instructions. He could never figure out how they got all the text onto that small, four centimeter piece of silk, but he had never really thought anyone would be doing any reading between the sheets. For the most part, that was an irony that brought a genuine smile to his face. Something he hadn’t done in one month, fourteen days and the some-odd hours since his last court appearance with that deranged bitch.
The house at the corner of Elm and Biro was not fancy, nor was it meager, by any stretch of the imagination. It was a fabulous attempt at the median, somewhere between the two, but never quite one way or the other. There were lavender shutters at every window except the small one that looked into his home-office, and a stark blue door that scarcely matched the shutters, the pale yellow siding or the country-gray shingles. One story, cookie-cutter. A home forged from the mold of blue-collar mediocrity, and painted to match. With just enough room to breath, feed the kid and take a piss in without complaining about lack of space.
Of course, it was a wonder he had been lucky enough to score this staple American home. Almost a dozen loan requests stamped with the big red ‘**** you’ of approval before his father finally broke down and lent him the money on what he dubbed a “tentative investment.” That meant high risk and little promise of solid return for the prickly retiree. Sixty-eight years old, forty of those spent behind the ice cold stone of an investment brokerage, turned the old man into a cynic who kept his calculator in one hand and a subtle insult in the other.
The old Plymouth (another gift from his loving paternal motivator) screeched as it pulled into the steep driveway. At least Laney had listened to him about leaving her toys all over the damned place. The first hundred times hadn’t been enough, but when the emergency break gave out and sent their other car speeding into the busy street, a scolding followed like none she had ever seen before, or likely would for the rest of her life. It had been the only time he had laid a hand on her, and would do it again as soon as hell froze over. Of course the insurance company wrote the accident off as negligence, and they had him there, but he wished he could have brought one of the agents over to pops’s house when he asked to borrow the old man’s boat-on-wheels. He might have had every one of the suits pitching in portraits of Benjamin and the Boys just on sympathy alone.
The garage was still filled with half her stuff. Every time he opened the door it was like she was standing there with that goddamned telephone, broken and bloody in her hand, staring at him like a rabid dog hungry to spread the love. Piles of her clothes made a messy heap in one corner. A box with “upstairs bathroom” written on the side in big strokes of black ink held a treasure-trove of shoes; heeled and open-toed, some strapped some not; an assortment of colors that would have made a box of crayons jealous. He would never have believed she had so many of the damned things. Then again, they had never lived in a place with an “upstairs bathroom.” Yet there they were, both staring back at him as if to say, “you should have been looking a bit closer, Jon.” It was his father’s voice echoing back at him as from some distant memory. Another on the list of pops’s chronicles of disappointment? No. Though the old man’s voice it may be, it was himself that was doing the heckling. He had been an idiot. A grown up idiot that made one of those dumb mistakes his father hated him doing when he was a kid; not looking where one was going, not paying attention to things right in front of one’s face...
The bitch had ruined his life. She had wrapped him up in her red panties so tight he couldn’t breathe and soon forgot why it was necessary. It was hard to escape a gorgeous leg when it was cradled around your own, harder still to escape the promise that lay a few inches north at the crossroads of those two tanned beauties. Karen had an insatiable desire for him that no other women had ever shown. He was decent looking, but no jock, and certainly nothing to lust over. Karen must have been blind. Gorgeous, witty, the sexual prowess of a woman twice her age (and he should know, he often relied on the old cougars when the younger ones weren’t biting during his casual dating days) and with the drive behind it to make a rabbit sweat. She wasn’t blind of course, she was something else entirely. He was the one in need of the walking stick and dark glasses. Right into the trap he fell, headlong and furiously fast.
It was two nights after the wedding when the first real signs started to appear. He only noticed them then as the nervous jealousy of a new bride. Karen had insulted two waitresses for staring at Jon while taking his drink order. She ran the first one off with a quip that said it all too subtly for a man to pick up unless in hindsight. But the second one Karen ran up and down like a concubine at a public stoning. She was utterly possessive, and it was cute in the beginning. Beautiful, witty, sexual, and she loved him enough to want to keep him all to herself. Of course he thought the vows would have stated that very thing sufficiently enough. The way she looked at women after the walk down the aisle, you would have thought the “I do’s” were an open invitation to blow her husband under the table while she sat waiting on her Merlot and a fresh basket of bread.
It got worse as time went on, worse at some points more than others, but downhill nonetheless. There were days he thought of simply giving up, leaving her for some other poor schmuck to pick up off the street, baggage and all. Instead he gave in to her cries for children, hoping it would establish that normal house-and-home ecosystem that seemed to make marriages work. Laney was a joy that he wouldn’t have given up for a new car, a house with two stories or a wife without a case of marital-schizophrenia, but he knew that bringing her into this mess was a mistake. Almost at the moment of conception a voice told him that now this was going to get much harder. Harder to deal with, harder to leave, harder to justify escaping.
Things had been rocky yet somewhat stable for a few years after that. The little girl seemed to be the flesh-and-blood equivalent of a chill-pill for her mother. It was when Laney was old enough to head off to school that he decided to start going back to that unforgiving institution himself. A degree that paid in salaries instead of hourly wages was the first step to some measure of normalcy.
Two years later he was working in a small commercial design firm, underneath that fat lout McCarthy on a Mac running last decade's OS and with a version of graphics software that he had never heard of his entire journey through the arts program. Of course it wasn’t the outdated tools sitting in front of him that was the problem. His wages were decent, the benefits were promising and the hours were, as McCarthy had so eloquently put it during his second interview, “as flexible as Lisa in spandex.”
That was the problem. Lisa. Slender, with legs climbing up to her soft golden locks and a wispy smile that could have you staring at her lips almost as long as he imagined most men stared below her chin. She was flirty, too. Fiercely so. With little use for modesty on certain, uncomfortable occurrences in the narrow hall leading to the paper room; a hallway that he and she often frequented, and by some idiot’s luck often frequented at the same time. Without people watching she could be suggestive, even straight-forward at times. It was all playful talk though; at least that’s what Jon told himself, as he had little interest in her flirtations. Despite his wife’s faults, he had some values of his father in him that couldn’t be shaken. Monogamy was a comforting thought. Karen suspected otherwise through the entirety of their marriage, even after it happened, but he knew the truth of it and that was what mattered, especially now.
Lisa was a problem. A problem because she often sent him home smelling of lilac and cucumber perfume; one of those chance brushes in that narrow hallway (or not by chance) he guessed. A few too many times walking through the door with her scent on him and the shell finally cracked. From there things happened too quickly for him to form a clear picture of events in his mind.
Karen knew the schedules of almost every employee at McCarthy’s. The talent left early, at 5:30 or 6:00 depending on the workload; the office whores, as she often called them, stayed late, filing and getting the paperwork in order for the next day. Lisa ran the front desk and had an easier load than the rest of the bunch, but she liked to stay and gossip and usually left with Patty, the office manager, at around 7:30. They left the door open for latte deliveries and the occasional pizza when it got too late to hope for dinner at home.
The police report said 7:13. Seven, one and three; numbers Jon would never forget. He was barely out of the shower when he heard the front door slam. Laney was in her room, music blaring, not noticing the commotion. He threw on a robe and headed out into the hallway. There, at the end of the hall, his clothes sat in a heap, burning wildly next to a can of lighter fluid. Filling up a kitchen pot as quickly as he could, he hurried to put out the fire. It took a few trips but nothing was too badly damaged.
Karen had turned the deadbolt before she actually closed the door, slamming it so hard as she left that the frame had split and cracked. A small oak table beside the door held a letter addressed to him in script that looked like it had been written by a madwoman. It didn’t take reading the letter, but looking down at the pile of burning clothes to know that she surely and truly was. And he knew right where she was headed.
By the time Jon had gotten dressed and carted Laney off to the neighbors’ house without explanation, he had formulated the quickest way to the office. He might be able to beat her there. She had a lead foot, but he had been at McCarthy’s long enough to learn the back ways when traffic was too slow for his tastes. She must have run through every traffic light and stop sign on the way, and it was no wonder that the cops were already swarming around the front entrance of the office. The door of her car was still opened, stopped dead right in front of the building. Parking spaces were for sane people. His wife no longer belonged to that category.
What was left of Lisa’s face was being photographed by a woman with Crime Lab written on the back of her jacket, barely visible through the mass of cops pushing fingers into his chest and telling him to back off. What was left of the phone was little more than metal and plastic, strewn across the ground beside Lisa’s wrecked corpse. That was being photographed too, its little pieces numbered like bullet shells at a shooting. What was once Lisa Anderson was stuffed into a nondescript black bag and loaded into the back of a meat-wagon. Karen was nowhere to be seen, though he could almost feel her eyes on the back of his head, peering at him from behind the tinted window of a cruiser.
Jon hadn’t seen her again until her arraignment. People were watching her from every seat of the courthouse, but her eyes were always on him, always watching. Throughout the proceedings she turned around every chance she could, staring him down like pork on a spit. The lawyer types were short and sweet, not like in the movies, and he was glad for it. Conversations were not filled with jousts of verbose conjecture. Just a few words of straight-forward truth, one standing out above the crowd: murder. Bond was denied and the trial would start as soon as possible. On the way out of the courtroom, through one of the side-doors reserved for the orange suits, Karen looked at his reflection in the dark, lattice patterned window, eyes glittering like two gems, rudely cut and as sharp as broken glass.
The sound of the garage door closing behind him made him jump. Everything made him jumpy these days. Even the damned dishes seemed to shift in the sink when it was just quiet enough to spook the **** out of him. He placed his keys on a hook above where the oak table had once stood. The letter had gone to the evidence room, along with the burned clothes, but the table had been his doing. With the rest of the stuff tainted by that evening, it had disappeared, long on its way to the evidence room at the county landfill. The table had held her letter like a hand holding a gift of razorblades. It was a stupid thought, but the first few weeks after Lisa’s death the table had been moved to a dozen places in the house before he realized he couldn’t live with the damned thing anymore. A table doesn’t commit murder, he told himself. But neither did guns and they always made him cringe.
Something was odd about the air, oddly pleasant actually. Laney had never taken to cleaning the house, but maybe in her confusing grief she had turned a new leaf. She had been happy about Melissa’s birthday party, happier than she had been in one month, fourteen days and some-odd hours. Mourning the loss of her mother was a difficult thing for her, especially since she knew right where she was, and the circumstances that landed her there. Jon had thought about being less up front with her, but in the end that might end up making her resent him for something out of his control. Maybe she would have blamed him for all of it, as if his lie to keep her guarded from the nature of her mother’s actions had been the very thing that caused it all to happen.
Jon undressed to his undershirt and boxers and had the teapot on before a shower was even a thought. Today was a day to relax, showers were for later. The newspaper from the day before sat on the table unread, an article that did not involve his wife’s murderous outburst was an interesting one, and the front page was filled with them. Smiling for the second time today, he made his way to the living room, newspaper in one hand, tea in the other. As it was in his old routine he turned the 24 hour news channel on for background noise while he read. The sound of the anchormen talking was a sort of block he used to drown out the silent humdrum of loneliness as a bachelor. He welcomed it back with a toast of English Breakfast and a quick turn to an article in the Arts section.
Not two lines into the reading when the word “escaped” broke his concentration like two burning trains colliding in complete silence. From there on the newspaper and tea became unwanted accoutrements, set aside like they never existed at all. Setting the volume to max, he listened as the local newscasters went on with their breaking story.
“In a freak turn of events, the transport vehicle used to transfer detainees to and from the Birmingham County Courthouse was overturned in a spectacular four-car collision, earlier this afternoon. Police report that no one was seriously injured, but three of the suspects actually managed to escape during the chaos. One of them a defendant in arguably the most controversial murder trial since the school shootings of 2002.”
“That’s right Jane. Now, two of the suspects have been detained at a local car dealership, trying to break into one of the vehicles. The other, Police speculate, is within a five mile radius of the accident site. Local law enforcement and city officials have urged all residents to stay inside their homes and that anyone with information leading to the capture of the third suspect please call Crimestoppers, the number should be on the bottom of your screen. There is a 10,000 dollar reward for any info leading to the arrest of Karen Sullivan...”
The rest faded away as the footsteps came down the hallway, that oddly pleasant smell in the air drifting toward him stronger and stronger with each echo. Lilac and cucumber. Lisa’s perfume. Karen’s image appeared halfway behind the archway leading into the living room. She was wearing her favorite pair of red panties and nothing else. She slid her hand across the molding, looking part the sexual monster she once was and part the beast she had become. As she slithered the rest of her body into the room her other hand scraped against the wall as if her claws were raking the paint. Jon new Karen had been one of the rare beauties in the world who never took to keeping her nails long. A few lithe steps and her hand fell away from behind the wall, the flashing steel of the knife turning as she twisted it round and round in her grip.
Jon panicked at first, trying to get up from his seat to run for the door. Karen was just over a hundred pounds, a fit woman, lean and trim, but easily handled under the sheets. Panic soon turned into mind-numbing fear as Jon’s legs stayed planted right where they were, heavy as oak roots digging into the hardwood floor. His toes were like rocks, his knees frozen solid. He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out save a gurgling sound that his throat made as his brain worked futilely to send pleas for help. Stop! Please, Karen, what the hell are you doing? But his voice was a distant thing ringing in his head, like a bell tolling for a ghost town. The arms at his sides were like dead weights, his hips solidly planted into the cushion of his favorite chair. The only thing left for him to do was piss himself, and he couldn’t even feel the warmth of the fluid invading his pants when he finally let go. Lilac and cucumber.
He watched and he listened, and that was all he had left.
Those panties had never looked so red before. It was the light, he thought, it must be the light. She still looked gorgeous, like the girl he had bent a knee to with a cheap ring hiding within a suede box. That’s when his sight started to dwindle, things going all blurry like the dream sequence of some low budget movie he saw in high-school. There were so many things he missed about school, so many things he still wanted to do.
The hearing was all he had left now. And her voice, once as sweet as a songbird, was a monstrous thing, deep and cutting. That thin meekness was gone, replaced by wickedness and cold, hard-wired intent.
“I hope you liked your tea Jon. I know it’s your favorite. Did you miss me?”
Jon felt the tugging and that was all. Tugging at his waist, his abdomen, a sharp pulling that seemed to be coming from deep within his belly. He felt cold suddenly and a bleak calmness swept over him as his arms and legs seemed to grow smaller and smaller, until he was merely that voice, alone and rattling in his head like a madman. Karen, what are you doing? The tugging came from his throat then, a tugging that brought the cold on quicker, draining the warmth from the small shred that was left. His ears began to ring, and through the maddening peal he heard one distant voice before the cold finally consumed him, the scent of lilac and cucumber coming nearer and nearer with the whisper…
“You’re mine Jon. Till death do us part. You said it yourself.”
As he turned the corner, Jon put foot to gas as heavily as he could without looking like a deranged loony hell-bent on running down the neighborhood kids playing hockey in the street. Home was calling, and it called with the sweet promise of silence and an afternoon of rest; not a precious minute of it could be wasted. Robert McCarthy was an unforgiving asshole of a man, but even he knew when someone was reaching their breaking point. Jon was the poster boy for ‘almost-there’ by the time the clock hit lunch.
With the afternoon away from the office and McCarthy’s mint-tinged breath, and little Laney off to her friend Melissa’s birthday hullabaloo, there was nothing more to do but enjoy some much needed peace and quiet. Maybe a good book would fit the bill. He couldn’t remember reading a lick since Karen had swaggered her way into his life, seducing him from the normal comforts of his routine with pillow-talk and red lace panties that always seemed to be made from nothing but a piece of string and a small white tag with washing instructions. He could never figure out how they got all the text onto that small, four centimeter piece of silk, but he had never really thought anyone would be doing any reading between the sheets. For the most part, that was an irony that brought a genuine smile to his face. Something he hadn’t done in one month, fourteen days and the some-odd hours since his last court appearance with that deranged bitch.
The house at the corner of Elm and Biro was not fancy, nor was it meager, by any stretch of the imagination. It was a fabulous attempt at the median, somewhere between the two, but never quite one way or the other. There were lavender shutters at every window except the small one that looked into his home-office, and a stark blue door that scarcely matched the shutters, the pale yellow siding or the country-gray shingles. One story, cookie-cutter. A home forged from the mold of blue-collar mediocrity, and painted to match. With just enough room to breath, feed the kid and take a piss in without complaining about lack of space.
Of course, it was a wonder he had been lucky enough to score this staple American home. Almost a dozen loan requests stamped with the big red ‘**** you’ of approval before his father finally broke down and lent him the money on what he dubbed a “tentative investment.” That meant high risk and little promise of solid return for the prickly retiree. Sixty-eight years old, forty of those spent behind the ice cold stone of an investment brokerage, turned the old man into a cynic who kept his calculator in one hand and a subtle insult in the other.
The old Plymouth (another gift from his loving paternal motivator) screeched as it pulled into the steep driveway. At least Laney had listened to him about leaving her toys all over the damned place. The first hundred times hadn’t been enough, but when the emergency break gave out and sent their other car speeding into the busy street, a scolding followed like none she had ever seen before, or likely would for the rest of her life. It had been the only time he had laid a hand on her, and would do it again as soon as hell froze over. Of course the insurance company wrote the accident off as negligence, and they had him there, but he wished he could have brought one of the agents over to pops’s house when he asked to borrow the old man’s boat-on-wheels. He might have had every one of the suits pitching in portraits of Benjamin and the Boys just on sympathy alone.
The garage was still filled with half her stuff. Every time he opened the door it was like she was standing there with that goddamned telephone, broken and bloody in her hand, staring at him like a rabid dog hungry to spread the love. Piles of her clothes made a messy heap in one corner. A box with “upstairs bathroom” written on the side in big strokes of black ink held a treasure-trove of shoes; heeled and open-toed, some strapped some not; an assortment of colors that would have made a box of crayons jealous. He would never have believed she had so many of the damned things. Then again, they had never lived in a place with an “upstairs bathroom.” Yet there they were, both staring back at him as if to say, “you should have been looking a bit closer, Jon.” It was his father’s voice echoing back at him as from some distant memory. Another on the list of pops’s chronicles of disappointment? No. Though the old man’s voice it may be, it was himself that was doing the heckling. He had been an idiot. A grown up idiot that made one of those dumb mistakes his father hated him doing when he was a kid; not looking where one was going, not paying attention to things right in front of one’s face...
The bitch had ruined his life. She had wrapped him up in her red panties so tight he couldn’t breathe and soon forgot why it was necessary. It was hard to escape a gorgeous leg when it was cradled around your own, harder still to escape the promise that lay a few inches north at the crossroads of those two tanned beauties. Karen had an insatiable desire for him that no other women had ever shown. He was decent looking, but no jock, and certainly nothing to lust over. Karen must have been blind. Gorgeous, witty, the sexual prowess of a woman twice her age (and he should know, he often relied on the old cougars when the younger ones weren’t biting during his casual dating days) and with the drive behind it to make a rabbit sweat. She wasn’t blind of course, she was something else entirely. He was the one in need of the walking stick and dark glasses. Right into the trap he fell, headlong and furiously fast.
It was two nights after the wedding when the first real signs started to appear. He only noticed them then as the nervous jealousy of a new bride. Karen had insulted two waitresses for staring at Jon while taking his drink order. She ran the first one off with a quip that said it all too subtly for a man to pick up unless in hindsight. But the second one Karen ran up and down like a concubine at a public stoning. She was utterly possessive, and it was cute in the beginning. Beautiful, witty, sexual, and she loved him enough to want to keep him all to herself. Of course he thought the vows would have stated that very thing sufficiently enough. The way she looked at women after the walk down the aisle, you would have thought the “I do’s” were an open invitation to blow her husband under the table while she sat waiting on her Merlot and a fresh basket of bread.
It got worse as time went on, worse at some points more than others, but downhill nonetheless. There were days he thought of simply giving up, leaving her for some other poor schmuck to pick up off the street, baggage and all. Instead he gave in to her cries for children, hoping it would establish that normal house-and-home ecosystem that seemed to make marriages work. Laney was a joy that he wouldn’t have given up for a new car, a house with two stories or a wife without a case of marital-schizophrenia, but he knew that bringing her into this mess was a mistake. Almost at the moment of conception a voice told him that now this was going to get much harder. Harder to deal with, harder to leave, harder to justify escaping.
Things had been rocky yet somewhat stable for a few years after that. The little girl seemed to be the flesh-and-blood equivalent of a chill-pill for her mother. It was when Laney was old enough to head off to school that he decided to start going back to that unforgiving institution himself. A degree that paid in salaries instead of hourly wages was the first step to some measure of normalcy.
Two years later he was working in a small commercial design firm, underneath that fat lout McCarthy on a Mac running last decade's OS and with a version of graphics software that he had never heard of his entire journey through the arts program. Of course it wasn’t the outdated tools sitting in front of him that was the problem. His wages were decent, the benefits were promising and the hours were, as McCarthy had so eloquently put it during his second interview, “as flexible as Lisa in spandex.”
That was the problem. Lisa. Slender, with legs climbing up to her soft golden locks and a wispy smile that could have you staring at her lips almost as long as he imagined most men stared below her chin. She was flirty, too. Fiercely so. With little use for modesty on certain, uncomfortable occurrences in the narrow hall leading to the paper room; a hallway that he and she often frequented, and by some idiot’s luck often frequented at the same time. Without people watching she could be suggestive, even straight-forward at times. It was all playful talk though; at least that’s what Jon told himself, as he had little interest in her flirtations. Despite his wife’s faults, he had some values of his father in him that couldn’t be shaken. Monogamy was a comforting thought. Karen suspected otherwise through the entirety of their marriage, even after it happened, but he knew the truth of it and that was what mattered, especially now.
Lisa was a problem. A problem because she often sent him home smelling of lilac and cucumber perfume; one of those chance brushes in that narrow hallway (or not by chance) he guessed. A few too many times walking through the door with her scent on him and the shell finally cracked. From there things happened too quickly for him to form a clear picture of events in his mind.
Karen knew the schedules of almost every employee at McCarthy’s. The talent left early, at 5:30 or 6:00 depending on the workload; the office whores, as she often called them, stayed late, filing and getting the paperwork in order for the next day. Lisa ran the front desk and had an easier load than the rest of the bunch, but she liked to stay and gossip and usually left with Patty, the office manager, at around 7:30. They left the door open for latte deliveries and the occasional pizza when it got too late to hope for dinner at home.
The police report said 7:13. Seven, one and three; numbers Jon would never forget. He was barely out of the shower when he heard the front door slam. Laney was in her room, music blaring, not noticing the commotion. He threw on a robe and headed out into the hallway. There, at the end of the hall, his clothes sat in a heap, burning wildly next to a can of lighter fluid. Filling up a kitchen pot as quickly as he could, he hurried to put out the fire. It took a few trips but nothing was too badly damaged.
Karen had turned the deadbolt before she actually closed the door, slamming it so hard as she left that the frame had split and cracked. A small oak table beside the door held a letter addressed to him in script that looked like it had been written by a madwoman. It didn’t take reading the letter, but looking down at the pile of burning clothes to know that she surely and truly was. And he knew right where she was headed.
By the time Jon had gotten dressed and carted Laney off to the neighbors’ house without explanation, he had formulated the quickest way to the office. He might be able to beat her there. She had a lead foot, but he had been at McCarthy’s long enough to learn the back ways when traffic was too slow for his tastes. She must have run through every traffic light and stop sign on the way, and it was no wonder that the cops were already swarming around the front entrance of the office. The door of her car was still opened, stopped dead right in front of the building. Parking spaces were for sane people. His wife no longer belonged to that category.
What was left of Lisa’s face was being photographed by a woman with Crime Lab written on the back of her jacket, barely visible through the mass of cops pushing fingers into his chest and telling him to back off. What was left of the phone was little more than metal and plastic, strewn across the ground beside Lisa’s wrecked corpse. That was being photographed too, its little pieces numbered like bullet shells at a shooting. What was once Lisa Anderson was stuffed into a nondescript black bag and loaded into the back of a meat-wagon. Karen was nowhere to be seen, though he could almost feel her eyes on the back of his head, peering at him from behind the tinted window of a cruiser.
Jon hadn’t seen her again until her arraignment. People were watching her from every seat of the courthouse, but her eyes were always on him, always watching. Throughout the proceedings she turned around every chance she could, staring him down like pork on a spit. The lawyer types were short and sweet, not like in the movies, and he was glad for it. Conversations were not filled with jousts of verbose conjecture. Just a few words of straight-forward truth, one standing out above the crowd: murder. Bond was denied and the trial would start as soon as possible. On the way out of the courtroom, through one of the side-doors reserved for the orange suits, Karen looked at his reflection in the dark, lattice patterned window, eyes glittering like two gems, rudely cut and as sharp as broken glass.
The sound of the garage door closing behind him made him jump. Everything made him jumpy these days. Even the damned dishes seemed to shift in the sink when it was just quiet enough to spook the **** out of him. He placed his keys on a hook above where the oak table had once stood. The letter had gone to the evidence room, along with the burned clothes, but the table had been his doing. With the rest of the stuff tainted by that evening, it had disappeared, long on its way to the evidence room at the county landfill. The table had held her letter like a hand holding a gift of razorblades. It was a stupid thought, but the first few weeks after Lisa’s death the table had been moved to a dozen places in the house before he realized he couldn’t live with the damned thing anymore. A table doesn’t commit murder, he told himself. But neither did guns and they always made him cringe.
Something was odd about the air, oddly pleasant actually. Laney had never taken to cleaning the house, but maybe in her confusing grief she had turned a new leaf. She had been happy about Melissa’s birthday party, happier than she had been in one month, fourteen days and some-odd hours. Mourning the loss of her mother was a difficult thing for her, especially since she knew right where she was, and the circumstances that landed her there. Jon had thought about being less up front with her, but in the end that might end up making her resent him for something out of his control. Maybe she would have blamed him for all of it, as if his lie to keep her guarded from the nature of her mother’s actions had been the very thing that caused it all to happen.
Jon undressed to his undershirt and boxers and had the teapot on before a shower was even a thought. Today was a day to relax, showers were for later. The newspaper from the day before sat on the table unread, an article that did not involve his wife’s murderous outburst was an interesting one, and the front page was filled with them. Smiling for the second time today, he made his way to the living room, newspaper in one hand, tea in the other. As it was in his old routine he turned the 24 hour news channel on for background noise while he read. The sound of the anchormen talking was a sort of block he used to drown out the silent humdrum of loneliness as a bachelor. He welcomed it back with a toast of English Breakfast and a quick turn to an article in the Arts section.
Not two lines into the reading when the word “escaped” broke his concentration like two burning trains colliding in complete silence. From there on the newspaper and tea became unwanted accoutrements, set aside like they never existed at all. Setting the volume to max, he listened as the local newscasters went on with their breaking story.
“In a freak turn of events, the transport vehicle used to transfer detainees to and from the Birmingham County Courthouse was overturned in a spectacular four-car collision, earlier this afternoon. Police report that no one was seriously injured, but three of the suspects actually managed to escape during the chaos. One of them a defendant in arguably the most controversial murder trial since the school shootings of 2002.”
“That’s right Jane. Now, two of the suspects have been detained at a local car dealership, trying to break into one of the vehicles. The other, Police speculate, is within a five mile radius of the accident site. Local law enforcement and city officials have urged all residents to stay inside their homes and that anyone with information leading to the capture of the third suspect please call Crimestoppers, the number should be on the bottom of your screen. There is a 10,000 dollar reward for any info leading to the arrest of Karen Sullivan...”
The rest faded away as the footsteps came down the hallway, that oddly pleasant smell in the air drifting toward him stronger and stronger with each echo. Lilac and cucumber. Lisa’s perfume. Karen’s image appeared halfway behind the archway leading into the living room. She was wearing her favorite pair of red panties and nothing else. She slid her hand across the molding, looking part the sexual monster she once was and part the beast she had become. As she slithered the rest of her body into the room her other hand scraped against the wall as if her claws were raking the paint. Jon new Karen had been one of the rare beauties in the world who never took to keeping her nails long. A few lithe steps and her hand fell away from behind the wall, the flashing steel of the knife turning as she twisted it round and round in her grip.
Jon panicked at first, trying to get up from his seat to run for the door. Karen was just over a hundred pounds, a fit woman, lean and trim, but easily handled under the sheets. Panic soon turned into mind-numbing fear as Jon’s legs stayed planted right where they were, heavy as oak roots digging into the hardwood floor. His toes were like rocks, his knees frozen solid. He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out save a gurgling sound that his throat made as his brain worked futilely to send pleas for help. Stop! Please, Karen, what the hell are you doing? But his voice was a distant thing ringing in his head, like a bell tolling for a ghost town. The arms at his sides were like dead weights, his hips solidly planted into the cushion of his favorite chair. The only thing left for him to do was piss himself, and he couldn’t even feel the warmth of the fluid invading his pants when he finally let go. Lilac and cucumber.
He watched and he listened, and that was all he had left.
Those panties had never looked so red before. It was the light, he thought, it must be the light. She still looked gorgeous, like the girl he had bent a knee to with a cheap ring hiding within a suede box. That’s when his sight started to dwindle, things going all blurry like the dream sequence of some low budget movie he saw in high-school. There were so many things he missed about school, so many things he still wanted to do.
The hearing was all he had left now. And her voice, once as sweet as a songbird, was a monstrous thing, deep and cutting. That thin meekness was gone, replaced by wickedness and cold, hard-wired intent.
“I hope you liked your tea Jon. I know it’s your favorite. Did you miss me?”
Jon felt the tugging and that was all. Tugging at his waist, his abdomen, a sharp pulling that seemed to be coming from deep within his belly. He felt cold suddenly and a bleak calmness swept over him as his arms and legs seemed to grow smaller and smaller, until he was merely that voice, alone and rattling in his head like a madman. Karen, what are you doing? The tugging came from his throat then, a tugging that brought the cold on quicker, draining the warmth from the small shred that was left. His ears began to ring, and through the maddening peal he heard one distant voice before the cold finally consumed him, the scent of lilac and cucumber coming nearer and nearer with the whisper…
“You’re mine Jon. Till death do us part. You said it yourself.”
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