The Caretaker's Wife

  The Caretaker’s Wife

  The Caretaker’s Wife

  Vincent Zandri

  The following is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in an entirely fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Vincent Zandri

  Cover and jacket design by 2FacedDesign

  ISBN 978-1-947993-44-0

  eISBN 978-1-947993-76-1

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019937337

  First hardcover edition April 2019 by Polis Books, LLC

  221 River St., 9th Fl. #9070

  Hoboken, NJ 07030

  www.PolisBooks.com

  “The devil got his money’s worth that night.”

  —James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice

  “The only thing you’ve got, Sheriff, is a short supply of guts.”

  —High Plains Drifter

  Prologue

  Loon Lake

  February

  Two years ago

  They say you could hear their screams from all the way out in the road. High-pitched screams of unimaginable suffering and torture. Maybe two dozen townspeople stood outside in their mackinaws, wool watch caps, gloves, and mittens, surrounded by a bitterly cold night that was strangely illuminated in an iridescent orange/red glow by the roaring flames of a two-story house fire.

  A house fire that was no accident, or so the rumors go.

  The townsfolk gathered in the road and stared at the old wood house, and they were helpless to do anything about it, for fear they, too, would be burned to death. Even the sheriff, who stood tall in the center of the crowd, could do nothing. His arms hanging by his side, the brim of his cowboy hat pulled down over his eyes as if to conceal his tears, he, too, was paralyzed with grief and fear. His job was to protect the men, women, and children of Loon Lake. If he were to begin making arrests, they would all be killed. No one would be spared. His hands were tied, and his heart and soul burned along with the flesh of the four innocent souls trapped inside that doomed house.

  No one dare say a single word while their cloud-like breaths rose up into the night along with the black smoke from the burning building. Not even the town’s one firetruck had been summoned to the scene. What was the point? It was instead parked idly behind the sheriff’s headquarters where it would remain until the house was burned to the ground.

  They say you could not only hear the screams of the family—the mother, father, and their young elementary school-aged son and daughter—but you could hear some laughter too. The laughter came from two men. One voice was lower and burlier than the other. The second voice squeaked while it laughed. It was, according to the witnesses, one of the most horrible sounds one could ever hear.

  The laughter was coming from the two men who started the fire and who bound the four family members to the chairs that surrounded their kitchen table. The first man, the fearless leader, was the mastermind behind the burning. The second man, his big, black leather clad right-hand goon, was the one who followed the orders to a T.

  They say that while the fire began to spread in the kitchen, Fearless Leader pulled out his smartphone and began to film the family while they suffered a most horrible death. He filmed the faces of the mother and father as they writhed in pain, while the children screamed in agony. He filmed it so he could go back to it again and again and relive the torture. He even made Right-Hand Goon get in the picture along with him so that they could immortalize the event with a selfie.

  So they say…

  But they also say that two state trooper cruisers finally showed up. That the yellow and blue state law enforcement officials offered a ray of hope in an otherwise bleak scenario. They say that four gray-uniformed men emerged from out of the cruisers. Three white men and one black man. All of them were said to be big men. Troopers didn’t accept small men into their ranks. Only big, strong men. Only honorable men. Only brave men.

  Despite the flames that were now shooting out all the windows and the roof, they say the troopers ran towards the house. They were careful to keep their backs to the people and especially the sheriff. It was as if they didn’t want anyone to recognize their faces. They quickly made their way around the back and entered into the kitchen through the back door.

  It’s also been said that Fearless Leader wanted to take one more selfie video, this one including the troopers, before they would have no choice but to exit the burning home before the fire flashed over. If it were to flash over while they were still inside it, they would all be goners.

  But no one to this day has ever seen the photos. No one has ever viewed the video documenting the deaths of the innocent family. All the people of Loon Lake Township have to go on is what they and their helpless sheriff witnessed from out on the road on that frigid February night and the rumors that soon began to spread around the little lake town that time forgot. Rumors that their town had been taken hostage by some very bad men from downstate. Gangsters, hoodlums, and blood-thirsty mobsters. The innocent men, women, and children of Loon Lake were helpless, abandoned, and perhaps even doomed, and there wasn’t a thing they could do about it.

  That’s what they say, anyway.

  1

  Present Day

  It was spring now, but the little house on Orchard Grove in the North Albany suburbs had become as cold and barren as a dead womb. The two women who’d occupied it with me, my wife and our daughter, were not only gone but so, too, was any sign of their physical presence. It was as if they had died while I was away. They had died, and no one had told me about it. Rather, no one bothered to call or write to tell me they were in trouble or in need or want of anything. It was as if they and their memory had been entirely erased during the twenty long months I was away from them, living behind iron bars, concrete, and razor wire.

  But here’s the reality of the matter: my wife of fifteen years, Leslie, and our thirteen-year-old, Erin, were indeed gone…vanished. For how long, I had no idea. But they had taken much of their clothing with them. Also a few books and most of their toiletries, makeup, and some odd pieces of jewelry. When I checked inside the closet for the cash we stored inside a strong box—five thousand dollars—it, too, was gone. I could only assume they hadn’t died or disappeared or become abduction victims, but were, in fact, down in Palm Beach, Florida where Leslie’s parents owned a condominium that overlooked the ocean.

  I’d barely set my bag down on the floor of the ranch home’s vestibule, and hadn’t even taken my coat off yet, before the reality of their leaving began to set in. It wasn’t like I expected them to greet me with open arms, having arrived home from nearly two years in Sing Sing, but it might have been nice to at least find them waiting for me. I guess I expected too much from them.

  But then, where are my manners?

  My name is Jonathan Kingsley. But you might know me as JA Kingsley, a variation of my Christian name I assumed at the behest of my agent back when my career was in the crapper. That was at the time when chick lit was all the rage and, at best, readers—almost all of them women, go figure—would identify me as female. At worst, the name would be dubious enough that the readers would give me the benefit of the doubt. Whatever the case, the pen name change worked, and while my name isn’t up there with the Pattersons and Kings, it is not entirely anonymous either. In fact, I went on to sell quite well and even nabbed a few prestigious awards along the way.

  As of late, the career stalled what with my run-in with the law. I could go into great detail about how I tossed a man through a plate glass window at Lucy’s Bar after he mouthed off about my drinking. Bu
t it wasn’t the drinking comment that got to me so much as the fact that he had been fucking my wife while he renovated our master bathroom. I might never have known had he not put the moves on my doctor, of all people, when he started in on a renovation of her house. When Leslie had moved out of the bedroom during the month-long renovation period, I just figured she wanted to be close to the spare bathroom. Made sense to me. But it wasn’t until my doc sent me a Facebook message indicating that, in all probability, Leslie had been boning the carpenter, I was able to put two and two together.

  When he showed up at Lucy’s Bar one evening to collect food for him and his wife, he offered to buy me a beer.

  “Not that you need one,” he said.

  I guess that was his idea of a joke.

  I smiled, thanked him, then put him down with a swift right hook that he never saw coming. I might have ended it there, but the rage took over, and my blood got hot as it sped through my veins. He was a big guy and had to be six or eight inches taller than me, but he could have been ten feet tall and it wouldn’t have mattered. I just scooped him up off the floor and heaved him out the window, shattering the plate glass into a million little pieces.

  Listen, I might have stopped then and there. But when I followed him outside and proceeded to bash his skull against the pavement, they all came out of the bar and pulled me off him. I guess by then I was foaming at the mouth, my eyes red and wide, my face hot and covered in sweat and little bits of his blood. He was still alive and even crying like a baby at that point, but they—the cops—still wanted to slap me with attempted murder. But here’s the thing: he refused to press charges because he felt like shit for screwing my wife behind my back in the first place, especially when you took my daughter and her feelings into consideration.

  I guess that was his idea of contrition.

  But the Albany County DA wanted to go ahead and throw the book at me, no pun intended. In the end, we plead them down to second degree aggravated assault so long as I agreed to do three years. I got out on parole just short of two, not only because I minded my own business and kept my nose clean, but I’m told the literary workshop I ran for the more creatively inclined inmates was a model grassroots program in prison reform. The warden, a fellow Gulf War vet, shook my hand when I was finally freed and he asked me to sign a copy of my latest novel, The Bastard, for him. I signed it, “To my gracious host and fellow warrior, with affection, Kingsley.”

  But what all this reminded me of, oddly enough, was my writing. I’d done some in the joint, but it’s not easy being creative in a place like that. It’s tough concentrating on putting even two words together when you’re constantly looking over both shoulders and trying to develop eyes in the back of your head. In fact, I was more anxious in prison than I had been as an Army Ranger stationed on the battlefields of Iraq during the Second Gulf War. Trust me, taking a town like Fallujah, for instance, was no picnic. I might have distinguished myself in Sing Sing with having formed a writer’s workshop, but the thick, jagged scars I bore on my chest and back were proof positive that prison life was absolute hell. It was a game of survival as much as it was loneliness and despair.

  Back to my first point about not being able to write in the joint. No writing for the past twenty months meant I wouldn’t be getting any advances or royalties anytime soon, which meant I’d better write something pretty damn quick or I’d be starving. Truth be told, I was kind of counting on that five Gs Leslie and I had stashed away in the closet. Wasn’t it just like her to steal it out from under me when I needed it most? Oh well, what the hell, I still had a credit card. It would have to do until I wrote something worthwhile. Something my agent could sell to the big New York publishers. That is, if I still had an agent.

  Inside the bedroom, I started going through the drawers, looking for any kind of spare cash or change I could gather up. I would have gone through my drawers, but all my clothes had been consolidated into one bottom drawer. Pants, shirts, underwear, and socks. It also dawned on me that there were no longer any pictures of me hanging on the walls. It was as if Leslie wanted me as out of sight as much as possible.

  I went through her drawers, including the one that stored her panties. I saw that she had loaded up on new stuff since I’d been gone. Silky black stuff. Nice stuff. Expensive stuff with matching bras. It made me angry because I knew now that without a doubt she was still sleeping with somebody else. Maybe even the carpenter. But somehow, just the thought of her sleeping with someone else made me hard at the same time. It had been a while since I got laid, and I never once gave in to any of those animals in the joint who will bang anything with a hole.

  I looked at her picture that hung on the wall. It was a shot of her at the beach in Cape Cod. I’d taken it of her on an afternoon just after a big storm. In the picture, there’s a big black cloud on the horizon. But she’s smiling for the camera. Her long, dark hair is parted over her left eye, and it’s blowing in the wind. She’s wearing a blue, horizontally striped French sailor’s shirt and loose, white trousers. I recalled how I fucked her inside the bathroom while our daughter napped in the hotel room. I remember she finished me off by taking me into her mouth and sucking the daylights out of me, swallowing me dry. Those were the days.

  The picture beside that was of Erin. She’d yet to turn thirteen in the shot. She still had that cute, optimistic perkiness about her that I remember so well. It’s her school picture from the fourth grade, I think. Fourth or fifth grade. There’s an American flag for a backdrop behind her, and her folded hands are resting on an encyclopedia. She’s looking not directly at the camera but instead, a little off to the side, like somebody called out her name at the exact moment the picture was taken. Her hair is long and black just like her mom’s, and her smile is infectious. Damn, how I would miss her.

  Closing up the underwear drawer, I opened the one next to it. It held Leslie’s jewelry. The stuff she left behind, anyway. I grabbed a couple of sterling silver bracelets and a handful of gold rings and stuffed them in my pocket. They’d bring in maybe one hundred bucks at the pawn shop. Hell, maybe even more. Closing the drawer, I made my way to the front hall closet and went through every coat pocket. I netted three crumpled dollars and two dollars thirty-three cents in loose change.

  What the hell had my world come to?

  As I was closing the closet door, I saw something on the floor. It must have fallen out of a pocket while I was digging through it. It was a brochure that was partially folded, partially crumped up, as though somebody had stuffed it into their pocket and quickly forgot about it. Bending down, I picked it up and smoothed it out. It read, Loon Lake Inn, Cottages and Tavern. Below the writing was a black-and-white picture of a small pine tree covered lot with maybe a half dozen cottages on it, along with a bigger building that must have housed the tavern. I guessed the photo was taken from a boat on the water since the lot was surrounded by a pristine lake. All the cottages were made of rough pine wood by the looks of it, with asphalt shingle roofs. Each cottage had its own stone fireplace too, which made it all seem kind of cozy, peaceful, and woodsy. Below the picture was the tagline, “Peace and quiet on a trout-stocked lake. What more could you want?”

  I couldn’t help but smile, because I suddenly recalled where this brochure came from. I was a stickler for dragging the girls out on a Sunday, back in the days before I was sent to the joint. I’d wake everyone up early and insist they pile into the Jeep. If it was nice, I’d pull the top off, and that would just make them crankier since the wind would mess up their hair. But eventually, they would start to have fun, especially if it was a warm summer day with lots of sunshine.

  It was just such a day maybe three or four years ago that we were joyriding up in the Adirondacks. We were taking the narrow winding road around Loon Lake when I happened upon a crummy old homemade sign mounted to a big old oak tree along the side of the road that said, Loon Lake Inn, one-half mile on the left. The sign also contained a black arrow pointing the way.
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  “Let’s go check this out,” I said to the girls.

  “Do they have food?” Erin said.

  “We’ll soon see, honey,” I said.

  “But no drinking,” Leslie said. She took hold of my free hand, squeezed it a little, to let me know she meant business.

  “Maybe just one draft beer, babe,” I said.

  She let go of my hand and exhaled loud enough for me to hear it.

  A half mile up the road, I slowed down and pulled onto a badly maintained two-track that led to the cottages. It wasn’t a long road. Maybe a half mile long. But it was two-sided by old pine trees, and the damp air smelled good and fresh. Soon, the road gave way to a clearing and the entire rustic facility which had been built on it. I remember feeling a start in my heart because it looked so quaint. Like a scene Norman Rockwell might have painted. I was tempted to force the girls into staying for the night.

  I stopped the Jeep and got out.

  “Come on, girls,” I said. “Let’s go get some lunch.” But they weren’t budging.

  “I don’t like this place, Jonathan,” Leslie said. “There’s nobody here. It’s creepy.”

  “I don’t like it either,” Erin said. She stubbornly crossed her arms over her chest, which told me she wasn’t budging either. If Leslie didn’t like something, Erin didn’t like it. And vice versa. But the hell of it was, they were right. There were no people to be found. No vacationers on a beautiful summer’s day.

  No one hanging out on the small sandy beach. No one out on the lake in canoes fishing for trout. No smoke coming from the cottage chimneys. No smell of bacon and eggs frying inside the tavern. Just nothing.