Текст книги "Fear Itself"
Автор книги: Duffy Prendergast
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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 16 страниц)
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It is strange, but I don’t ever remember being alone in the dark without being scared before that time at Rita’s house while I fretted over Sarah’s confinement. I had been scared ever since I was a little boy, so much so that even though my father insisted that it was pure quackery, my mother, posing in the rare role of the fervent matriarch, forced my father, under threat of divorce, to take me to see a psychiatrist.
I remember playing with a friend down the street from my parents house and having so much fun that I did not realize that the sun was fading, and once I did realize that it was dark I abandoned my friend and ran home in a fit of hysterics. I didn’t think that there was anything wrong with me. I thought that all kids were afraid of the dark. I learned later that most of the other kids were also afraid of the dark, but not to the point of irrationality. So my mother put her foot down and made my father take me to a psychiatrist at great expense because we didn’t have health insurance.
My conversation with the quack psychiatrist, as my father called him to his face (I believe I must have been no more than eight or nine years old at the time), was followed, during our drive home, with one of the few loving and sincere conversations I ever had with my father; a conversation in which he explained to me that I must not only overcome my fear of the dark but that I also must not let on to anyone that such a fear existed within me lest I be ridiculed by my schoolmates. I gave him my word but to tell the truth I broke my vow and confided in the only person outside of my family whom I would ever let know my secret. The pressure of subduing my overt fear was too great and I had to confide in someone. It was shortly after my visit to the psychiatrist that my soon-to-be best friend Tommy Sullivan moved into my neighborhood. I disclosed my phobia to him and him alone once I realized that we were best friends and that I could trust him.
Tommy became my protector of sorts. Despite my small stature, no one dared pick on me for fear that they would have to answer to Tommy Sullivan. On the few rare occasions when they did cross the line Tommy put a thumping on them.
I stared at a watermark on the dark ceiling above my adopted bed thinking of how it would be nice to have Tommy Sullivan to talk to. But I hadn’t talked to Tommy since shortly before I got married. He was upset that I didn’t have him as my best man at my wedding, but Catherine refused even to let me invite him based solely on the basis of the stories I told her of his violent nature.
But my true thoughts were elsewhere. My stomach was still in knots now that I had time to think about the perils of my predicament. The only thing keeping me from losing complete control of my nerves was the warmth of Sarah’s little body next to mine; a reminder of my life’s purpose. She was my constant intimation that I had to fight to the end to prove my innocence; but my innocence of what? Murder? Was it true that Catherine was murdered? The thought was absurd. I was with her the entire night. She may have slipped out of bed for a glass of water but how would she have gotten back into bed and nestled me if she were dead? There was no sign of an intruder. No broken window-glass; no loud startling noise; no busted lock. Besides, who would sneak into our house and quietly kill my wife while ignoring the other lives in the house? What had they gained?
And there was no way, absolutely no way, that Amber came all the way to Cleveland Ohio, tracked me down, and killed my wife. Our connection was intimate but we shared the mutual understanding that our families were more important than our relationship was. Amber understood that our amalgamation was noncommittal; almost pretend. We never planned to actually meet. Neither of us had anything to gain by abandoning our families and uniting. Besides, Amber was not the sort of person who would take a life. We role– played and as we did we also got to know each other quite well. Amber was a nice young woman in her mid thirties stuck in a droll marriage to a man who paid little attention to her. She was a mother; a house-wife. She lived on a five acre parcel in the sticks of Kansas. She had once been a striptease dancer so her moral character could be called into question if one were a prude, but she was just a child at that time, a victim of a molesting father out on her own at the age of sixteen. She did what she had to do to survive. She was not psychotic. She was not in Cleveland. That made no sense. The detective was reaching; trying to bait me. He must have thought I was as guilty as a vice.
No, I could not be taken alive; or at least not lying down. Sarah needed me. It was bad enough that she would have to spend the rest of her life without her mother; knowing that her mother had been murdered; knowing that I was a prime suspect.
Would Sarah someday wonder if I had done it?
I had heard of and read so many newspaper stories about falsely accused and convicted individuals; innocents with the wholesome misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time or who were ill-fated enough to so closely resemble the actual perpetrators of a crime that the jury was convinced of their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. I never thought that I’d be one of them.
Up to that point in time I had been a major proponent of the death penalty for all but the most accidental of murders. Fry the bastards! An eye for an eye! Only when I realized that I was in danger of being the scapegoat for a crime that I had not committed did I change my point of view. I knew that I might soon be Sparky’s next subject.
But how does one prove that one didn’t do something? I didn’t have much of an alibi. I was at the scene of the crime. But there was no contrivance. No weapon. But how was
Catherine killed? What sort of instrument would there have been? There were no marks on her body. I would have noticed if someone had hit her in the head; there would have been blood. Poison perhaps? But how and who? And how would the cops have jumped to that conclusion so quickly? They knew something that I did not. They had a weapon of some sort; or knew that there was a weapon; knew that she did not die of natural causes. But what could it have been?
A dull headache gradually gripped my head like a steel vice and I reached up with my index fingers and massaged my temples and closed my eyes and tried to blank my mind and to forget for a while where I was and why I was there.
The hotel room was like many I had stayed in. Not high class, but not quite dumpy; no cockroaches or bed-bugs but few amenities. The linens smelled clean enough. The quilt was the kind of neutral beige you find in such places with a red royal pattern. The quilt, though, was slightly damp. Not damp from being to quickly removed from the dryer, but rather musty from too much exposure to the moisture in the air. The furniture was the built– in sort of indestructible prefabricated mass produced and maple colored Formica that was crafted for so many such suites before the seventies. The carpeting was new, or at least newer; a brown durable Berber of thick and tightly woven yarn. The heavy gold curtains were drawn, by me, to block out the hastily approaching morning sunlight.
I needed to sleep, but every time I tried I would find myself still thinking twenty minutes later. I could almost feel the windy wake of the earth’s rotation rushing too quickly for my prelation, forcing daylight upon me before I could steal so much as a nap. I flipped and folded and crumpled my pillow for the umpteenth time, trying to delude myself into thinking that it was the un-moldable hotel pillow that was prolonging my exhaustion; denying me the bliss of torpidity. I watched as the clock crept in ten and twenty minute intervals from midnight until four in the morning. I slept like a corpse until seven a.m., and then played the clock game again until ten, waking from my shallow sleep just long enough to see that time had advanced a few minutes or a quarter of an hour. Sarah, other than occasionally feeling for me in the dark with the extension of a limb or the bob of her head, slept like a stone.
At ten-fifteen I finally decided that I wasn’t going to get any more real sleep and I got out of bed. I opened the curtains and found that the hotel room looked less desirable in the light of day than it had at night. There were coffee stains on the sink outside the bathroom. The carpet, while newer, was badly worn at the threshold and the wallpaper was yellowed and curled in places where it was peeling away from the wall.
After I showered and dressed I sat down on the bed next to Sarah where she still slept. It seemed a shame to have to wake her. She was so beautiful in her sleep; so peaceful.
But was she too peaceful? Was she a bit blue?
I panicked and jostled her awake and you would have thought that I’d won the lottery by my expression when her soft blue eyes opened, peaking sheepishly through strands of her sandy-blond hair. She looked up at me confused.
“What’s wrong daddy?”
I didn’t realize it right away but I was crying; dripping rainforest sized droplets onto her face while smiling in relief; she was not dead. One such experience was enough for a lifetime. Sarah reached out to hug me and I pulled her to me.
“Nothing baby. Nothing at all.”
I couldn’t handle any more death;
certainly not Sarah’s. She was my only reason for living now that Catherine was gone. I was a man that needed to be needed. That is why Sarah was such a Godsend. She came to us just as we had given up all hope of ever having a child. As a parent I became unwittingly addicted to being needed. I never even realize my addiction until Catherine died. Sarah was my crack cocaine.
“Were you thinking about Mommy?” “Yeah, honey. That’s it. I was thinking about Mommy.”
“It’s okay Daddy. Grandma said that
I’ll get to see her when I go to heaven.” “That’s right honey.”
“So can we go to heaven today? I want to see mommy.”
I held her to my chest and rocked her. No one she had known had ever died. No pets. Not even a goldfish. To her, heaven was a place not so far away. I guess in reality that was true.
* * *
Sarah bathed and then we dressed back into the clothes we had worn the day before. We had no choice since we had arrived at the hotel late and exhausted. We had no toiletries so I had the hotel’s maitre’ de send up toothpaste, toothbrushes and deodorant.
We could have gone to the store to buy a change of clothes but I figured that we could stop by the house and get what we needed. If the police were there I we could talk them into a couple of t-shirts and a few pairs of jeans from our laundry room. If no one was there I figured that I would simply have to cross the line; slip through a window or the rear sliding door to the family room (the lock had been broken for years and Catherine had even given up on bugging me to fix it). Money was pretty tight, and there was no telling how long we would have to stay at the hotel or more importantly how soon we could reoccupy the crime scene which was our home. I didn’t have any local family to speak of. My parents were dead and I had no siblings, so the only family I had for hundreds of miles was Catherine’s parents. Staying there was obviously not an option. I didn’t want to spend what little cash I had or the limited available balance on my credit cards on clothes knowing that we might be in desperate straights before long.
Outside of our room we made our way down the long poorly lit hallway decorated with outdated and dingy red and gold wallpaper and stained and worn royal red carpeting. The light fixtures were the plastic globed sort with the grooved lines through which you could easily make out the pot-bellied outline of the incandescent light-bulb. Sarah pressed the elevator button with the down arrow and I could hear the elevator bellow and grunt from a distant place below us before finally opening. From inside the elevator we could hear long cumbersome groans, very much like a recording of whales under water I’d heard on the nature channel, as we descended to the lobby. The Lobby was the only modern aspect of the building. The carpet was hunter-green near the elevators and the lobby itself had ivory marbled floors and bright white and gold walls with newer crystal sconces and a large brass chandelier which towered before the twin glass exit doors. The beauty of the lobby was basically a lie, foretelling of lavish updated rooms which might well be in the offing but were obviously not. A clerk with a round boyish face and a curly mop of black hair in a hunter-green uniform stood behind a long Corian topped desk with an absent minded look on his face and he seemed almost startled when Sarah rang the little bell on the counter even though he had watched us as we approached.
I checked out of our room, optimistic that we could return home before nightfall. In television detective shows it seemed that crime scenes were often tied up for days, weeks or months. That couldn’t be the case in real life, I thought. I often worked from home after-all and I was basically out of business without my computer. I needed to work to pay the bills. They couldn’t deny me the provision of income for my family, I thought.
Sarah and I climbed into my car. We put our seatbelts on and, as usual, she held my hand while I drove. Her face looked tired, but she was smiling a little.
“Are we going to see mommy now?” “No honey, we’re going home to get some clothes.”
“When will we get to see mommy?” “Not for a long time.”
Her upper lip rolled into a pout and she started to cry. I squeezed her little hand.
“I want to go see mommy in heaven.” Given that she was already crying I didn’t want to upset her further. “We’ll see.”
“Will she be normal in heaven?” She tried to control the tremor in her voice.
“What do you mean?”
“Will she be blue, like she was on the bed?”
I squeezed her little fingers again, “No, sweetheart, she isn’t blue anymore.”
Sarah undid her seatbelt and looked up at me to see if I would protest. Normally I would have forced her to buckle it right back up. But her face was begging me to let her crawl under my arm so I lifted my arm and she slid beneath it and up against me. I held her tight. I wanted to make it all better for her, but there was no way to do that. I felt so helpless.
When I pulled into my driveway there were several police cars camped out along with some vans. I took no notice of the lettering on the vans assuming that they belonged to the police department and held forensic equipment or something of that nature. I got out of the car pulling Sarah with me, and lifted her up into my arms. I carried her up the driveway. Detective Bergant stepped out from behind a van.
“I don’t think you want to be here right now.” His eyes were sharp and serious.
“Why not?”
He pointed to the side of a van. It read “Channel 5 News Team”.
I’m sure he didn’t care about my wellbeing. After all I was guilty in his eyes. He was looking out for Sarah. Perhaps there was a soul buried deep beneath the badge he kept on his vest pocket. I turned and walked back toward the car but I heard the distinct clip– clop of high-heeled shoes scraping against the concrete walkway that led to our front door, and son the footsteps were racing down the driveway toward me. I opened the driver-side door and slid Sarah into the car in one motion but before I could slip into the drivers’ seat I heard a female voice closing in on me.
“Did you kill your wife Mr. Derrick?”
A slender pretty little black woman dressed neatly in a business suit charged at me holding a microphone as though it were a spear. She stopped at my door and shoved the microphone against my face. A clumsy looking long haired Asian man with blue-jeans and a white sport shirt was hastily making his way down the driveway, slipping and sliding on the smattering of wet leaves that speckled the gravel, while trying to balance a camera on his shoulder. I closed my car door to shield Sarah from the vultures.
“No! I did not kill my wife!” I felt my face tighten into a scowl as I stared into the woman’s eyes trying my best to withhold the torrent of anger that was building inside of me.
She looked back at her cameraman giving him a wave. I knew instantly that what she wanted most was to capture my scowl on the camera; the scowl of a guilty murderer. I took the opportunity to open my door and climb into my car. I started the car and backed down the driveway with the two of them chasing after me.
“What do they want daddy?”
“Nothing honey. They just wanted to ask me some questions.” I pulled her to me so that she wouldn’t slide off of the seat as I turned out of the driveway and onto the street. I accelerated down Erie road and just drove. I had nowhere to go so I just cruised down Lakeshore Boulevard trying to figure out my next move.
* * *
At seven in the evening, with Sarah asleep in the passenger seat, I turned off my headlights and parked my car at the foot of my neighbor’s driveway and crept through the patch of woods that divided our yards and into my own driveway with the stealth of ninja. I darted from tree to bush to bumper to garage like a clumsy middle-aged giraffe. I was jittery, as usual, when alone in the dark nearly crapping myself when I mistook a two headed chrysanthemum for the eyes of an ogre. I made my way through the once pink-flowered Peonies bushes which lined the front of our house and over to the front door. The crime scene ribbon which had earlier guarded the entry was still in place. I slid across the left side of the house, hugging the vinyl siding, and tripped over some dead potted plants which
Catherine had not gotten planted before the Lake Erie gales began to blow and the planting season had passed. I managed to catch the ground with my hands narrowly missing a head-butt with a thorny flowerless rose bush which doubled as a short green gremlin after dark. For all the noise I was making I might as well have pulled into my own driveway and waltzed through the front door. Instead I removed my muddied tennis-shoes on the black plastic mat at the rear sliding door and I slipped into my house; my house! Why did I feel like such a delinquent?
I found the laundry room in the dark but switched the light on once I was inside with the door closed. There were no windows to betray the light (or the thick musty odor of soiled sweat-socks) so I knew it was safe to illuminate the room. I grabbed a laundry basket and filled it with jeans and shirts and socks and underwear for both Sarah and myself. I turned off the light and slipped back through the sliding doors and back to the driveway. I froze with fear when I got to the bumper of Catherine’s car. At the foot of the driveway I could see the soft orange glow of a Cyclops’s single eye…or, as my brain nullified the illogical probability of the former, a cigarette being drawn upon in the pitch of a moonless night. I was busted. It had to be detective Bergant puffing on one of his Marlboro’s. I stood up and walked boldly down the middle of the driveway and right toward the glowing cigarette. I was nervous and shaking on the outside but I smiled and did my best to exude a calm and innocent façade.
“I’m sorry, I needed some clothes.” I sat the basket on the ground in front of me.
“What?”
The voice was female. It was not the good detective smoking but rather my neighbor Millie.
“Millie, it’s you. I thought it was that damned detective.”
“Oh god! Don’t hurt me!” Millie dropped her newly lit cigarette on the ground and started to back away from me and towards the edge of the street.
“Millie, it’s me. Matt.”
“But you…you killed Catherine.”
“No, I didn’t.” I drew a long breath, “And it’s getting a little tiresome having to defend myself from those ridiculous accusations.” I raised my hands in exasperation and was surprised when Millie flinched. “Millie, we’ve known each other for almost ten years. Have you ever known me to be the least bit violent?”
“But it said on the news…and that detective. He asked me about you. He asked me if I knew…” Her eyes grew wide and she just stared at me.
“Millie…he asked if you knew what?” “If I knew if you and Catherine had been fighting.”
“What else?” I was getting angry. She had obviously done some blabbing. Catherine and I bickered occasionally, like any couple, but we weren’t particularly loud and certainly not physical. It dawned on me that Millie wouldn’t have been so scared of me if she hadn’t exaggerated her story to the detective.
“He wanted to know if either of you were having an…affair.” She cringed as if to defend herself from a blow. “And you said…?”
“I said I didn’t know. I said it was possible.” Once again she cringed as if she was about to be stricken.
“What?” I could hear myself yelling now. “Why would you say something like that?” I stepped over the laundry basket and backed her further down the driveway until her posterior was pressed against the back of my mailbox post. “How could you tell them that I might be having an affair? I’ve never cheated on Catherine in my life.”
“No…no…that’s not what I meant.” She was crying now. She was genuinely scared of me; and why not? I was a murder and a philanderer. I might rape her and kill her too!
“Why would you say such a thing?” Millie, her tall skinny mop-headed frame almost skeleton-like in the dark, turned and ran down Erie road, past my car and up her driveway and into her house, and all the while she was waving her hands about like a panicked school-girl, stumbling and staggering as though she were running from Freddy Kruger. I picked up my laundry basket and walked back toward my car. I got to her driveway just in time to see the light of her foyer disappear as Millie’s front door closed behind her. That explained it, I thought. That explained why detective Bergant interrogated me over my phone-friend Amber. My car was still running. I opened the rear driver-side door and I shoved the basket of clothes into my back seat and I climbed into the car and I drove back to the hotel which I realized Sarah and I would have to call home for days to come.
