As I Die Lying (31 page)

I was positive Frye was in there, dusting for
prints and taking measurements and chain-smoking cigarettes. I had
a feeling he was going to be a clever adversary. Minor conflict was
essential to any story, to keep the audience interested while the
main game played itself out. The Insider was up for a
potboiler.

Xandria’s apartment was in an old two-story
house about a block from campus and a couple of streets away from
the stone house, up on a wooded hill. Paint curled from massive
Colonial columns and a tall oak tree showered orange leaves on the
tin roof. The windows had black shutters and the watery sun
reflected off the glass like light from dying eyes. The November
sky was heavy and sober above the brown hills.

Beth sat in a metal rocking chair on the
porch. She wore a red sweatshirt and blue jeans and canvas-top
sneakers. Sunglasses couldn’t hide the puffiness around her eyes.
She tried to smile at me, but her face looked like it might break.
Her lips quivered a little and pressed together.

“
Beth,” Bookworm said,
running up the concrete steps like Bogart making for Bacall. I
stooped and hugged her. Little Hitler could smell the salt of her
tears. Mister Milktoast knelt and gripped her hands. My reflection
danced in her sunglasses. Loverboy primped and checked his
hair.

“
Richard,” she said. “It’s
all so…I don’t know…unreal, maybe. It hasn’t really sunk in
yet.”

“
Beth, Beth,” I whispered,
rocking her softly. I pressed my cheek against her soft hair that
was like corn silks. Bookworm thought the “corn silk” simile was
utterly corny. He hadn’t lived in Iowa, though.

“
So awful, so awful,” she
repeated in my ear.

“
Do they know how it
happened?”

“
I shouldn’t have left her
alone. You know, Halloween and everything…”

“
You can’t blame yourself,
Beth.”

“
But it’s all my
fault.”

The dam was about to burst again. She looked
like she had cried through the night. Her face was blotched from
the blood rush of her emotions.

“
It’s not your fault, Beth.
You’re another victim. It’s nobody’s fault, except…except for
whoever did it.”

“
But who? Who? She didn’t
have an enemy in the world, and this isn’t your typical Halloween
prank. Oh, God, Richard, what am I going to do?”

“
When did you first...?”
asked Mister Milktoast. Loverboy wanted to add some smart-assed
remark about snaring a drummer or banging a gong or gobbling a
drumstick but I slammed shut the door to his room.

Beth wiped at the pink end of her nose with a
damp wad of Kleenex. “I looked for you at the party,” she said,
avoiding my eyes by looking out at the rocky slopes of Widow’s Peak
in the distance. She forgot she was wearing sunglasses, that I
couldn’t have read her eyes anyway.

“
I left early. I wasn’t
feeling well. I drank a beer and it made me sick. My dog ate my
homework. I had a flat tire. My grandmother died.”

Beth nodded and looked down at the warped
pine boards of the floor. She spoke, her voice as hollow as if she
were talking inside a coffin. “After I couldn’t find you, I hung
around until just after midnight, when there was nobody left but
sloppy drunks and the costume freaks. I partied some with the band.
Then I got home, I don’t know, I told the police it was one
o’clock, but it was probably more like two-thirty. And I went
straight to sleep. Passed out, to be honest. I didn’t even see
Monique.

“
I got up yesterday and did
a little studying. I noticed Monique’s door was open just a crack.
And she’s usually an early riser, you know how energetic she is...”
A sob caught in her throat as she tensed to change tense.
“...
was
, I
mean.”

I patted her knee. Loverboy let my hand linger for a
moment. Mister Milktoast wanted to know which story she’d told the
cops, which lie we’d use. Bookworm assured him that just because
the Bone House was a den of prevarication didn’t mean the outer
world had a foundation of fabrication. Whatever that meant.

The screen door squeaked and Xandria stepped
out. She carried a cup of herbal tea. Steam wisped around her dark
face. Her eyes were cold and faraway, artist’s eyes that saw too
well. She put the tea in Beth’s hands and reached a protective arm
around her shoulder. I smelled raspberry and lemon and
uncomfortable silence.

I stood up and nodded to Xandria. Beth looked
up at her with a grateful expression. “I was just telling
Richard...”

“
You don’t have to talk
about it if you don’t want to,” Xandria answered.

“
I know, but...Richard
understands.”

You damn straight, bitch. Been there, done
that. If anybody knows how to deal with personal tragedy, it’s
Richard Fucking Coldiron, ma’am.

Xandria glared at me for a moment as Little
Hitler smirked inside my pupils.

“
Fine. But if you need
anything, you just holler,” she said. She tugged at the strap of
her coveralls and went inside. I sat in the chair next to
Beth’s.

She didn’t say anything for a moment, just
rocked gently and sipped her tea. She looked out across the town
below. She continued, softly, her words as light as the wind that
was stirring the leaves across the broken sidewalk.

“
I called out her name. I
figured she’d probably gotten up early or something, maybe went out
for a walk. So I put on a CD and read a little bit. Later, when I
walked past the hall, I saw something on the floor in her room,
something pale.”

She looked up at the top of the oak tree,
staring as if watching the memory on a movie screen. Her fingers
gripped the metal chair arm. Mister Milktoast cupped his palm over
her closest hand.

“
If it hurts to talk
about...,” he said.

...then talk about it, bitch. Because I need
your fucking pain. I need you to whimper and leak your pathetic
little human juices of sorrow. I need you to make Richard feel the
guilt. Give me some emotional content the reader can identify
with.

She pushed away, sensing my mood change. “No,
Richard, I’m dealing,” she said. “We were roommates for four years.
You get really close to somebody after four years.”

NOW you pretend to care. NOW you act like
you give a goddamn about anybody but yourself. But tell me more.
I’m just BEGINNING to rub Richard’s face in his own shit.

“
What did you see on the
floor, Beth?” I had to know. It had to hear her say it.

Her voice was flat, disbelieving. “I...went
to the door and peeked at the thing on the floor. It was a white
carnation.”

“
A carnation?”

“
Yes. Like the
one...”

“
Like the one I was wearing
with my costume. The one you gave me.”

She nodded. “I was confused, Richard. I
thought you might have dropped it when you came over earlier. I
pushed open the door to pick it up, and then I...I saw...”

And don’t you ever forget
it. Slut
.

“
You saw her,” Little Hitler
said, his glee moderated by Bookworm’s anxiety over this potential
piece of evidence.

Beth broke down, wept dry tears and dropped
her head. Loverboy reached out and cupped her chin. The gushing of
emotions aroused him, custard in a cruller. There are certain times
when erections are incredibly inconvenient—weddings and funerals
among them. When you comfort a broken woman, an intimacy develops
that healthy and sane men channel in an unselfish, platonic manner.
Maybe that’s why Alpha male psychos get all the pussy while
sensitive guys beat off to frilly fantasies of romance.

Beth recovered and sipped her tea.

“
I loved her,” Beth said.
“You know I don’t like to use that L word. But she was like a
sister to me.”

“
I do understand,” Loverboy
said. “I’ve lost loved ones to violence myself.”

Beth’s head jerked toward me. “You?”

“
My father,” Little Hitler
said with too much pride. “He was beating my mother, you know how
people do when they think they’re in love. She must have snapped or
something. She. . .”

Mister Milktoast somehow summoned some
crocodile tears. Little Hitler was bursting with mirth in the back
of my brain. Beth slid to the edge of her chair and put her other
hand over Loverboy’s.

“
. . .she went into the
kitchen and got a knife. Stabbed him seventeen times as I watched.
I was fourteen.”

Beth’s mouth opened in a silent O. “Richard,
I didn’t know...”

If only I could have fought to the surface,
reclaimed my body for one miserable heartbeat, I might have kept
her from digging into the past. But the wound was gaping, the blood
was flowing now, and she was drinking. She had broken me. She had
won.

No, Richard. I’VE won. It was always me.

“
I’m sorry, Richard. Don’t
cry,” she said, barely able to disguise the pleasure in her
voice.

Loverboy let a long tear trickle down his
cheek. He was laughing on the inside. Most of them were.

“
Tell me, Beth. Is insanity
contagious?” Little Hitler said. “Because sometimes I wonder...that
carnation...”

“
What? No, you must have
dropped it at the party. And Monique must have picked it up, that’s
all.”

Didn’t she see? Or was the Insider preventing
her from seeing?

Of course I am, Richard. The party’s just
getting started. I’m going to waltz your mannequin across the dance
floor of hell like the puppet hand of hot peppers is up your
ass.

Bookworm whispered something about the
Insider needing some help with its metaphors, but nobody was
listening.

“
Did you tell the police
about the carnation?” Mister Milktoast asked.

“
Why should I?”

Of course she didn’t, for the same reason
that the police hadn’t contacted me. It should have been a simple
matter for Frye to connect Shelley and Monique and come up with a
common denominator. The pieces weren’t in place yet, the plot
threads hadn’t been woven into a tight enough fabric. The Insider
needed a few more chapters.

Beth took off her sunglasses. Her eyes were
red and shiny, but buried inside her pupils was a spark, a strange
light, a distant hope of dawn.

“
Let’s not talk about
Monique anymore,” she said. “I want to talk about you. Your poor
father. That must have really torn you up.”

I wanted to tell her that the world couldn’t
build such miseries as ours, that gods couldn’t create such
madness, that people couldn’t be this cruel and shallow and
heartless. But I was vulnerable. After so much rejection, here was
someone who pretended to care, who wanted to hear my story.

“
I’d better begin at the
beginning,” I said.

THIS CHAPTER DOESN’T HAVE A NUMBER,
EITHER

What a clever bastard.

You know Richard is guilty. You will never
let him forget.

And you eat our pain. You carve up our psyche
the way you did Shelley and Monique, then feed Richard the pieces
of the memory. You force his mouth open. He eats his own sins until
he vomits, then he eats his own vomit. Is that your trap?

Because the more Richard hates himself, the
stronger you are. The more we despise you, the more we serve you.
The greater our pain, the greater your hunger.

You have tasted. And now you want more. But
not Beth. You’ll never have her.

I love her, however I can and whatever that
means.

Did you come with Little Hitler? Or are you
Little Hitler, a mask over a mask?

Did you raise the blade against Father? Or
were you Father? Was that your opening gambit, your narrative hook,
the crack through which you slid into Richard’s mind? Or did you
come later, like a grave robber to freshly turned dirt?

You say you came to him through Virginia.

Oh, I felt that twitch. You know where it
bleeds. But I know where you feed. And I’m starting to figure you
out.

And understand one thing, you sorry son of a
bitch.

You can make Richard loathe himself. You can
shove his face in the past. You can make him kill. You can make him
hate.

But you can’t make me not love.

Because love is hope, and love is poison to
you.

You are what you eat.

You are what we feed you.

Bon
fucking
appetit.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

November crawled away on its belly, wriggled
like a cold snake into a cave. Winter sent its icy fingers into the
granite mountains, clutching and squeezing. The brittle trees
froze, either dead or sleeping and dreaming of green. The daytime
sky shivered in its blue blanket and the nights were as black as
the bottom of my heart.

The police had no leads in Monique’s murder.
Mister Milktoast followed the media coverage with great interest.
My fingerprints must have been all over the crime scene. I didn’t
doubt that the Insider could extend its reach to the lab
technicians. And Frye surely would have solved the case by now if
not for infernal intervention.

The rejection slips rolled in, except now
they were no longer addressed to me. They began, “Dear Mr.
Zweicker, we regret to inform you...”

Even more disturbing than the name change was
that my cleverly original title, “As I Die Lying,” had been
altered, first to “The Dying Light,” and then simply “The Insider.”
Because the agents never returned my manuscript, I never knew which
work they were considering, nor did I have a clue how to improve
it.