Orchard Grove Read online

  Permanence

  The Innocent

  Godchild

  The Guilty

  The Remains

  Scream Catcher

  The Concrete Pearl

  The Shroud Key

  Moonlight Falls (UNCUT EDITION)

  Moonlight Mafia (A Dick Moonlight Short)

  Moonlight Rises

  Blue Moonlight

  Murder by Moonlight

  Full Moonlight (A Dick Moonlight Short)

  For Laura

  “[I]t was with a good end in mind—that of acquiring the knowledge of good and evil—that Eve allowed herself to be carried away and eat the forbidden fruit. But Adam was not moved by this desire for knowledge, but simply by greed: he ate it because he heard Eve say it tasted good.”

  — Moderata Fonte

  “Down to the closest friend every man is a potential murderer.”

  — Henry Miller

  Summer

  Orchard Grove

  North Albany, NY

  She slips on thick, white-framed sunglasses, and lies back on the chaise lounge, relaxing smooth long legs and a topless torso against the springy fabric. Snatching a green apple from the table beside her, she takes a bite out of it and stares directly up at the hot sun. She thinks, How funny that houses now stand where once were apple trees for as far as the eye could see. Apples I’d picked and ate until I could eat no more. An apple orchard where I could run and hide and no one would find me.

  The trees are all gone now, but the memories aren’t. The memories are still festering like open wounds.

  Why in God’s name did I have to come back here? Why, of all places, did we have to buy a house on this very spot of land? Maybe we bought the house because I wanted it that way. Because I can’t forget what happened here all those years ago. Because I relive the memories every day and every night of that bright fall afternoon, not as if it happened thirty-six years ago but only thirty-six seconds ago. Maybe we moved back here because I had no choice but to come back home to Orchard Grove.

  In her mind she’s a girl again.

  Her hair is long, blonde, and smooth as fresh linen. It runs down the length of her back, nearly touching the elastic rainbow colored belt that holds up her cut-off jeans. It’s early fall, but unseasonably hot. Indian Summer. She shouldn’t be running so hard. But she hasn’t got much of a choice. She’s running through the orchard, her breathing heavy and labored, tears falling down her face and into her mouth.

  There’s a man coming up on her from behind. A big man.

  He’s shouting her name. “Lana! Lana! Stop Lana!”

  He’s a man of forty. Strong from constant physical labor and bearing the wiry muscles of a farmer who works seven days a week. He’s wearing filthy khakis and an even filthier denim work shirt with a couple of buttons missing. Lana is afraid of the man because of what he will do to her when he finds her deep inside the apple orchard.

  “Lana, I’m coming!” he shouts, his voice cutting through her like the sharpest of paring knives. “You can’t hide from me, sweetheart. I’m your papa, Lana. Your father.” Slowing to a walk to catch his breath. “You hear me, sweetie pie? You don’t run from the man who protects you.”

  But still she runs. Runs as if the devil himself were on her heels. But he is not the devil. He is instead the man who calls himself her mother’s husband and because he is married to her mother, he is now her father. He is coming for her inside a fenced-in orchard that covers four hundred square acres. As frightened as she is, she wants him to chase her. That’s the plan. She knows that soon she will not have the strength to carry on. But then, neither will he. She will have to cease running. And when she does, she will be ready for him.

  Finally, she stops by a single tree that occupies a short incline.

  Winded and covered in a sheen of cold sweat, she need not run any farther. This is the place, after all. The place deep inside the apple orchard where she intends to put an end to the long nightmare.

  “I’m coming, Lana!” she hears. “You can’t hide. You know you can’t hide, sweetie. Not from me. Not when I love you so very much.”

  Reaching into her pocket, she pulls out the small black can of Mace. Glancing over her shoulder at the apple tree, she spots the meat cleaver she had placed there only last night. She’s ready for him. Ready for the step-monster.

  “Chill, Lana,” she whispers aloud while breathing deeply. “Just chill out and get your stuff together. You’ll get your revenge. But first you gotta relax.”

  He’s closer than she thought.

  Soon she spots him coming up on her in the narrow, grassy corridor formed between the linear rows of trees. Her heart pounds so forcefully, she feels she might faint right on the spot… right under the fully blossomed apple tree.

  But she can’t faint. Because what she’s about to do this man… this monster… will require every ounce of her strength, agility, and courage.

  When he catches up with her, he is breathing hard and perspiring, the sweat having stained the armpits on his shirt. Unbuckling his belt with one hand and running his opposite hand up and down his scruffy face, he forms a smile that is as far from happy as Satan is from sweet baby Jesus.

  “I like it when you run away from me,” he whispers in his gravelly, two-pack-a-day smoker’s voice.

  He’s standing so close to her now, she smells the sweat on him. The body odor. She breathes in his tar and nicotine-tainted breath.

  “Then maybe you’ll like this too,” she says, raising up the Mace can, aiming the nozzle directly for his face.

  He grabs hold of her shoulders just as she presses down on the nozzle.

  The clear spray shoots into his blue eyes.

  Releasing her, he brings both fisted hands to his face, fiercely rubs his eyes as if they were on fire.

  “You little bitch,” he screams. “I’ll get you for this.”

  She watches him squirming, crying, the snot pouring out of his nostrils, running over his lips onto his prickly chin, and she thinks, Right. I’m the bitch… I’m the little bitch… Well, asshole, just look at you now.

  Set vertically at the base of the apple tree, its handle positioned upward at the blue sky, is the cleaver or, what’s more commonly known in the trade as a meat-bone cutter. A thick blade that comes in handy for cutting up apples on the thick wood-slabs inside the cider house. The cleaver will kill the beast that has been ravaging her for months now.

  She takes hold of the two-pound axe-like blade, feels its awesome solid weight in her hand. Feels its power. Cocking it back, she takes aim and swings.

  But she’s not fast enough.

  Her step-monster grabs hold of her forearm only a split second before the sharp steel touches the skin on his sweat and filth-covered neck. He squeezes her forearm like he’s trying to crush bone while digging his fingernails into her skin. Her hand opens and the cleaver drops to the ground, bouncing off an exposed tree root.

  White-hot pain shoots throughout her body. She drops to her knees, screams.

  Reaching down with his free hand, he grabs a fist full of T-shirt, rips it away from her chest, exposing two small breasts protected only by a flimsy white bra.

  “Go ahead and scream,” he barks, the tears streaming from his poisoned eyes. “Not a soul can hear you.”

  Pushing her onto her back, he takes a knee, unbuttons his pants, pulls them down. He then pulls her jean shorts down, pushing them past her knees. Positioning thick hands between her legs, he pushes them apart with all the ease of pulling apart a rotted log.

  “Scream,” he insists. “I like it when you scream.”

  He forces himself on her and she feels like her entire body will tear in two.

  …Patience, Lana… Be strong…

&nb
sp; Reaching out with her right hand, she uses her fingertips to feel for the cold steel blade. She knows that in just a matter of a few seconds, the blade will find its home buried in the step-monster’s skull. Just believing that soon his blood will be spilling all over the orchard floor, makes the pain go away.

  He thrusts himself at her like a rabid, wild animal. Rather than resist him, she concentrates only on retrieving the blade. It takes great effort to move the blade one micro inch at a time. But then suddenly, she finds the blade gripped between her index finger and thumb. That’s when she shifts the cleaver around so that she can once more grab hold of the wood handle.

  The cleaver back in hand she does something that agitates the step-monster.

  She smiles.

  “Are you enjoying yourself?” he pants, his voice gravel-filled and coming from a place south of purgatory. “Maybe I’m not working hard enough.”

  “Don’t be angry with me, daddy,” she says.

  For a brief instant, he stops all movement. A single droplet of sweat falls from the tip of his nose to her pale lips. He shoots her a confused look like he’s suddenly been teleported to another planet.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you?” he says.

  “Please don’t be mad,” she says, swinging the meat cleaver around swiftly, burying the blade into the side of his head.

  The cleaver impaled in his skull, his wet blue eyes wide open, staring down at her, he tries his best to speak. But all he can manage is to move his mouth without sound. He makes a gesture with his left hand, like he’s swatting at a mosquito that’s buzzing around his ear. Sliding out from under him, she bounds up onto her knees, pulls the blade out of his head, a stream of dark arterial blood spurting out of the wound. She could stop then, run home to her mother, call the police, explain everything to them.

  But she does no such thing.

  Instead she watches the blood pouring out of his head, and she watches his eyes rapidly blink and his mouth open and close like he’s begging her to be heard. That’s when she feels something come over her. A warmth that’s different from the sun’s radiation. More like the kind of warmth you feel when you set yourself down gently into a hot bath.

  She’s no longer scared. Rather, she feels empowered. If this is what it’s like to play god, she loves it. She’s god about to enact her vengeance on the devil.

  Taking aim, she positions the cleaver at the mid-point of his neck. Then, cocking the blade back as if her arm were a coiled spring, she swings it against his neck, impaling it halfway through the flesh, bone, and cartilage. The surprising thing is that he’s still balanced on his knees, his eyes still wide open, mouth still moving like a ventriloquist’s wooden dummy. Still trying to form words. Pulling the blade back out like it were an axe buried in a wood stump, she takes one more swipe at the neck, this time severing the head.

  The head falls to the ground, rolls until a couple of rotten apples prevent it from rolling any farther. Peering down at the head, she’s surprised to see that the expression planted on her step-monster’s face is not one of fear or surprise, but more like confusion. As if he’s perfectly aware that his head is no longer attached to his body, and he has no idea how it got that way.

  Her eyes locked on his wide open eyes, she’s never felt more satisfied in her life.

  She’s happy.

  After she’s dressed herself and cleaned herself up as best she can, she calmly makes the half-mile walk back through the orchard to her white farmhouse. In the garage she finds a spade and a pickaxe. Waiting until dark, she heads back to the spot in which the step-monster lies in two separate pale pieces and she proceeds to bury him beneath the apple tree.

  It will take some time, but she’s seen enough episodes of Hawaii Five-O to know that sooner than later, he will be considered a missing person by the Albany Police Department. But she will always know the truth. His body will always reside beneath this tree while his soul rots in hell.

  Later on, when the farm is sold for a new subdivision to be called, appropriately enough, Orchard Grove, all the trees will be cut down to make way for dozens of the cutest little cookie-cutter houses you ever did see. But one tree will grow back, its limbs distorted and ugly, its fruit rotten, poisoned, and inedible.

  It will be a tree only Satan could grow.

  I started watching Lana Cattivo two months ago through my master bedroom window. You know the one what I’m talking about. The slider window that’s located at the top of a seven foot exterior bearing wall and that’s hell to open and close when it gets too hot outside and this thirty-six- year-old house warps and expands. The kind of slider window that seemed modern and hip back in the 1970s when the ranch house was constructed for twenty thousand dollars along with dozens of identical houses on what had been a pristine upstate New York apple orchard.

  Thus the name, Orchard Grove.

  The funny thing is, by the time I got around to buying this house, the twenty grand price tag had shot up to three hundred K. By no means a financial stretch for a somewhat successful Hollywood scriptwriter. Or so I assumed at the time. But now that it’s in foreclosure, I’ve had no choice but to glue myself to my typewriter and hope for a sale of David Fincher or Angelina Jolie proportions.

  It wasn’t the writing part that had been hard for me lately, but the selling part. Seems I couldn’t sell a script to my own mother if she were still alive, even if I put a knife to her neck and started slowly sawing. But as for the writing? Well the writing was still coming out okay.

  Correction… the writing had been coming out okay, until recently that is.

  Until she moved in on June first.

  The beautiful, blonde drink-of-water who moved in directly next door to my wife, Susan and me on Orchard Grove, as if this were the only place on God’s great earth she could have possibly moved to.

  Here’s how I’d watch her.

  I’d position myself directly to the left of a queen-sized bed that faced the east since Susan insisted a bed should always face the rising sun, and that by nine in the morning would be empty and made up with a blue satin bedspread and non-allergenic pillows covered in matching cases. With all the lights turned off in the bedroom on a bright sunny day like the kind we’ve enjoyed all summer long, no one could possibly see inside my bedroom from the outside, even with the shades wide open. The sun coming out of the east would create a glare that would blind anyone on the outside trying to look in.

  At least, that’s what I thought at the time.

  I had it all down to a science. If I positioned myself with my aluminum crutches far enough away from the surface of the slider window, I could see her without worrying for an instant that she, in turn, could see me watching her. Problem was, all too often I could make out my reflection in the window. The unkempt hair, the three-day facial growth, the almond-shaped eyes, and a slightly crooked nose that I broke during a high school football kickoff return. No one wants to see their own face looking back at them when secretly staring out the window at a beautiful woman.

  Sad truth is, I was housebound then, which sort of made spying on her easier since I wasn’t able to go outside very often and risk a run-in with her. You see, I’d just turned fifty, and years of football, jogging, hiking, weight lifting, had taken its toll on my feet. Not all scriptwriters are sedentary sloths who eat three-hour lunches with famous directors and spend the rest of the day bellied up to the bar. Some scriptwriters prefer to be men of action. But that action had caught up with me down in the jungles of Peru where I’d travelled late last year on my dime to research what I hoped would be my new movie. The movie that would re-launch Ethan Forrester’s career, even if he no longer lived in Hollywood, the land of broken dreams and shattered contracts…“Don’t call us, we’ll call you, fuck you very much.”

  But it was a script I would never get around to writing now that Lana had moved in next door. Her sudden presence in my life turned out not to be a distraction, but instead an obsession. A half-naked and beautiful o
bsession.

  But allow me to back up a bit.

  Because, let’s be real here. An obsession isn’t something that just pops up overnight like a boil on your ass cheek. An obsession takes time. It requires slow simmering. It needs to sprout and grow like a sapling into a sturdy tree with a healthy root system and leaves on the branches. It needs constant feeding and watering or it will die an early death. That said, maybe the right move for me would have been to cut off the food supply to my ever growing obsession which, of course, was none other than my watching her through the window. Maybe the right thing to do would have been to simply stop, concentrate on something else. Like a new script for instance.

  It didn’t help that my wife Susan had already gotten somewhat acquainted with Lana, having run into her at her local P90X workout class the two take together. Susan even carpooled with Lana. Since we’re spilling truths here, I’ll even admit that I got a special kick out of watching them get into Lana’s red convertible, the two of them wearing not much more than workout shorts and bikini tops. One brunette and the other blonde. With their sunglasses on, they looked years younger. Like a couple of college sorority girls heading for the beach.

  On more than one occasion since the Cattivo’s moved in, Susan offered to introduce me to Lana, but considering the condition I was in, I steadfastly declined. I just wasn’t myself any longer. My surgery had thrown me for a loop, and weeks of being off my feet made me feel fat, old, and insignificant. Not an easy thing to swallow for a man who was used to running three miles per day and training with weights for five out of the seven days.

  Plus I smelled.

  I hardly ever showered or bathed, and it was a struggle to work up the enthusiasm to shave. It didn’t help that I hadn’t sold a script in months… Okay, scratch that… hadn’t sold a script in years. Or that our house was in foreclosure proceedings, or that Susan who’d only recently entered full force into a new body-changing exercise regimen worthy a Navy Seal, was in the process of becoming a chiseled statue and just as hard. While her life changed for the better, mine seemed to know no bottom, as if in slicing open my foot and inserting four permanent screws, I’d allowed my life, my talent, and my confidence to spill out onto the floor.