Orchard Grove (39 page)

I dropped the pistol because I couldn’t bear its weight in my now weakened state. Looking down at my feet, I could see that Carl had jammed a six-inch piece of glass into the top of my sutured foot. The knife-like glass had penetrated the Velcro strap on my walking boot, along with my skin and flesh. After a brief beat, I was able to retain enough clarity to work up a thunderous scream while I kicked at his face with the boot heel on my good foot. His head reared back and he seemed on the verge of passing out while the back of his skull collided with his upper spine.

Sitting up, I did what I knew I had to do. I grabbed hold of the glass and yanked it out of my foot, then brought the blood-smeared triangular point down fast into Carl’s thigh.

He yelped like an injured dog, while once more I went for the gun. He turned himself around onto all fours, came at me with his mouth baring bloodied teeth. Aiming the barrel for that mouth, I pressed the trigger. There was an explosion and his head popped like a blood-filled water balloon slapped against a brick wall, his torso dropping dead weight onto my legs.

The gun was still gripped in my hand as it rested in my lap. I knew I should have been looking for Susan. What if she were still alive? Locked away somewhere in the house? In the basement maybe. But that was just false hope.

I knew she was dead.

They had been telling me she was dead all along, and that I was the one who killed her. I just had no recollection of the event. And if I had killed her, I had no reason in the world to live any longer. Carl’s piece was gripped in my hand and it was my turn to eat it. Opening my mouth, I raised the gun up, turned it upside down, and pressed the barrel against the roof of my mouth. Closing my eyes, I slipped my slipped my thumb into the trigger guard, just like John Cattivo taught me.

I was just about to depress the trigger when I heard the clatter of footsteps outside the gunroom door.

L
ana screamed.

I pulled the gun out of my mouth, once more rested it in my lap.

“It wasn’t supposed to happen this way,” she said, more angry than afraid. “You were supposed to die. We couldn’t take the chance on you testifying. That’s what Carl told us. You had to be disposed of for good.”

From down on the floor, I readjusted the gun in my hand, wrapped my hand around the grip, pointed the barrel at Lana.

“Where’s Susan?”

“You know where Susan is.”

“No I don’t. Now where is she?”

“Far away from here. Let that be your first clue. You only have to go so far as your secret garden if you want a second clue. But then, you know all this don’t you? You’re the one who did it.”

My body felt like it was burning up. Drowning in fever.

“How can she be far away?” I insisted, pressing my thumb on the hammer, cocking it back into firing position. “I thought you two were in love? What does her disappearance have to do with my pot patch?”

“Figure it out for yourself, Ethan.”

“Maybe I should just shoot you now and be finished with you forever.”

“You’re not gonna shoot me,” Lana said, working up the kind of smile she would assume when handing out cookies to the neighborhood children. “You’re much too in love with me for that. Every man and woman I’ve been with since I was twelve years old has been hopelessly in love with me and they have all paid the ultimate price. You’re a slave and once a slave, always a slave, Ethan. Now put the gun down and we can talk this through and then get the hell out of town. We still have a shot at being together. What do you say? Let’s just pack our bags and make our way south to Mexico. We go now, no one will ever catch us.”

I looked into her blue eyes.

“I lust you,” I said.

“Excuse me?” she said. “What’s that mean?”

“I lust you… I hate you.”

I waited until her smile faded entirely from her sweet face before I pulled the trigger.

L
ana dropped like a stone. She landed hard onto her chest and face. She began to convulse and tremble like there was something trying to escape her dead body besides her soul.

Maybe it was the devil who was trying to escape, if you believe in that kind of thing. Or maybe it was just her badness. Her evil core. Whatever it was, I could only look at her until her muscles stopped moving and she exhaled a final poisoned breath.

I
ran.

Didn’t matter that my foot was bleeding out or throbbing with blasts of sharp pain. At this point, I felt like gangrene had settled in for good, infecting my blood, infecting my mind. I didn’t care. I just needed to get to that pot patch. Susan wasn’t anywhere to be found. Lana said that I had done something bad to her and that my first clue was the pot patch. Carl also said I’d done something horrible and that I had to pay for it. The convenience store clerk said that I killed them all. But I had no recollection of doing anything bad.

No memory whatsoever.

I shoved Carl’s automatic, barrel first, into my pant waist, and exited the house onto the back deck. From there I made my way through the fence gate. My heart raced, my foot pulsated in bursts of agony and blood. My entire body was on fire. As I made my way in the darkness down the narrow alley created by the parallel fence exteriors, I began to make out the sound of sirens. Without a shred of doubt in my mind, I knew it had to be Miller and his men coming after me. He’d already called me once before and I hadn’t answered. He must have known that eventually, Carl would pick me up and arrest me. But it didn’t go down exactly as planned. Carl wanted to pick me up all right, but didn’t want me arrested. He only wanted me dead so he and Lana could live together forever.

What it all meant was that I had only a minute or two to check on the patch, to prove to myself that Lana was lying… that I had nothing to do with Susan’s disappearance. Once I did that, I would get the hell out of Orchard Grove. When I was a safe enough distance, I would send Miller the sound recording I’d made of Lana and Carl as they tried to kill me. It wouldn’t prove that I had nothing to do with John’s fake suicide, but it would shift most of the guilt to Lana. We’d all share in the guilt even if most of us were dead, or fast on our way to getting there.

I came around the fence to the small patch of woods, and in the moonlight I made out the spot where the coffee can had been extracted from the earth. I also made out something else. Another area beside it that had recently, as in mere hours ago, been disturbed so that the ground was no longer covered in dead leaves and varieties of vegetation. The area I speak of could not have been more than a couple of feet by a couple of feet, and it rose up out of the ground like a miniature burial mound.

All life seemed to drain out of my body then. What replaced it was inevitability. The ice cold realization that perhaps Lana and Carl had been telling the truth after all, and that my memory had indeed failed me, either because of the whiskey or simply a form of selective memory that can only be achieved after an event so violent and disturbing, the conscious brain can’t possibly process it.

I no longer felt the pain in my foot, no longer cared it if was leaking an oil slick of blood. I only needed to know what exactly had been buried inside that mound. Hobbling through the brush and onto the patch, I dropped to my knees like a penitent man. I brushed away the dirt and dug with my hands until I felt a cold, round, semi soft object. Like a pumpkin covered in a sticky liquid. When I brought my fingers to my face, I smelled the unmistakable iron-like aroma of blood.

I put my hands back on the pumpkin and felt something soft, lush, and gentle.

Hair.

Tears began to fill my eyes, the pressure building behind my eyeballs as I dug around the hair, until I uncovered a small portion of face and a single eye. I dug in my pocket for my car keys and the small LED laser light attached to the keychain, and I shined the light on the face and saw that the hair was dark. Brunette. I shot onto my backside, because I knew now what I was looking at without having to see it in its entirety.

“Oh my sweet Jesus,” I said, the first of the tears streaming down my face. “Sweet Jesus in heaven.”

I shifted onto my knees and brushed more of the dirt away and I could see that the head had been severed at the neck. Shifting myself, I vomited onto the loose dirt and fell back onto my side. I recalled the previous night when I’d gone to Lana’s home armed with a sharp French knife. I saw myself standing outside on the Cattivo back deck, the knife gripped in my hand while I listened to the sounds of Lana and Susan making love in the bedroom at the other end of the ranch home. In my head I saw myself going to the sliding glass doors, saw my hand taking hold of the opener, saw myself sliding the door open…

But that’s all I recall.

All I recall, that is, until I woke up in my bed, my hands covered in blood from the small cuts on my palms and fingers. Or so I could only assume. Had I actually made my way into the Cattivo house, crossed over the dining room and the kitchen, and entered into the master bedroom and killed Susan after catching her making love to Lana? My Lana? Our Lana? Had I been filled with a jealous rage not only at seeing the two of them together in bed, but knowing they’d been plotting against me all along to take the fall for John’s murder? Were there two sides to my personality? The movie maker artist and the cold maniacal killer? I was all too familiar with the artist, but I’d never been introduced formally to the maniac until now. Until last night.

“Oh sweet Jesus,” I repeated as I pulled myself up onto my knees, then up onto my feet. “I killed Susan. I… killed… Susan.”

…Or did I? I’d been drinking Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels makes me crazy, violent. It makes me black out…

As the tears fell, dripping off my chin and onto the raw earth, I did my best to cover up the shallow grave with dirt and dead leaves. Then, returning to my feet, awkwardly and out of balance, I began to make my way back through the brush, and around the fence perimeter to the Cattivo driveway.

C
arl’s truck was still parked in the driveway where he left it earlier, the keys still inserted in the column-mounted ignition. Opening the door, I shoved myself inside, turned the key, fired the engine up. For a beat or two, I stared out the windshield onto my new neighbor’s home-sweet-home, until I shifted my gaze onto my own home only a few feet away. They were the kind of neighborhood homes that would be a dream for a young couple just starting their new life together. I was there once myself. Me and Susan.