Orchard Grove Read online

  “I see.”

  For a time, we listened to the squirrels chasing tail on the trees in the heart of darkness.

  “Mind if I ask you a personal question, Ethan?”

  “You’re going to ask me whether I give you permission or not.”

  He snickered again. “You know, you writers. You really are sharp, I tell you. Anyway, here goes. Do you have any reason to believe that Lana was cheating on John?”

  My stomach went from feeling tight to feeling like it had just been pounded with a sledgehammer. Blood filled my face. I was sure it had because I could feel the heat in the skin and flesh. I was certain that I was blushing and that it must have shown beneath the scruffy five- day growth in the yellow, deck-mounted LED lanterns. A mosquito stuck its pincer into my forearm. When I slapped it, the blood it stored in its belly spattered and stained my skin.

  “Cat got your tongue, Ethan?”

  I cleared my throat, scratched the itchy bump on my forearm. In my head, I saw myself fucking Lana on my dining room table, Susan watching from outside the living room picture window.

  “No,” I lied. “I have no reason to believe she was cheating on him.”

  His face went stone stiff. It showed no sign of happiness, sadness, anger, melancholy, or anything at all resembling human emotion even if it was constructed of human flesh and blood. He slid his leg off the table, unfolded his arms, stood up straight and tall. In the semi-darkness of the deck, he reminded me of Dirty Harry.

  “That’s all for now, Mr. Forrester,” he said, returning the notepad and pen back to his pocket. He hadn’t written anything in it. “I’ll be in touch.”

  “That’s what Carl said.”

  He gave me a look. “Excuse me?”

  “That’s what Carl said… I’ll be in touch.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Must be a cop thing.”

  He went for the sliding glass door, but stopped just short of it. He turned.

  “Oh and do me a favor, Mr. Forrester,” he said. “Please don’t leave town for anything until I give you the green light. Okay?”

  “Am I suspected of something?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  His question took me by surprise. I had nothing for him. Nothing to say in response or, in this case, my defense. He made a pistol with his left hand, aimed the extended index finger at me.

  “One more thing,” he said. “Your wife, Susan. She and Lana… have they been friends for a while? Did they know one another prior to Lana moving into Orchard Grove two months ago?”

  “Why do you ask, Detective Miller?” I said, tossing his question right back at him.

  He said, “Well, they seem rather, ummmm, intimate, if you grasp my meaning.”

  “They only met a few days ago,” I said, despite recalling the text messages I found in Susan’s cell phone earlier.

  His gray eyes lit up.

  “That so,” he said. “Extraordinary. Perhaps they’ve been soul mates for all eternity and only now found each other.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Enjoy the beautiful summer weather, Mr. Forrester,” he said, as he slid open the glass door. “Before you know it, it will be fall and apple picking season.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “An apple a day keeps the coroner away.”

  “Very good,” he said. “You like apples, Mr. Forrester?”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “Some people consider them the true forbidden fruit.”

  “Adam and Eve.”

  “A God-damned pair if ever there was one,” he said before stepping through the door, sliding it closed.

  I turned and looked out onto the dark yard, and nearly collapsed from the sheer weight of my guilt.

  I sat outside as the police and the EMTs left the scene along with John’s black-bagged body. The night was warm and clear and my eyes were attracted to the moon. It was a waxing moon. I stared into its luminescent whiteness and I saw the face of Detective Miller. The hard, lifeless face told me in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t buying into the Cattivo suicide story for even a minute. Or, he wasn’t about to buy it until he’d exhausted every possibility of foul play first. Christ, how was I to know his two front teeth would break when I shoved the automatic into his mouth? And what about that blood stain on the floor? What if tests come back proving I was standing in that room hours earlier? It might prove that I had planned out the murder to look like a suicide. That would be murder one. Premeditated murder.

  No choice but to keep playing dumb.

  “It’s a suicide until I say it ain’t…”

  The door slid open and Susan stepped out. She was holding a beer in her hand, which she handed to me. I stared down at it, feeling its coldness against my palm and the pads of my fingers. At this point, it seemed like a gift from God even if it was a small offering from my wife. But at least she was being nice to me now.

  “How’s Lana?” I said. “Or don’t I get to ask?”

  She folded her arms, as if she were cold.

  “Taking it badly,” she said. “But then, you’re already aware of that.”

  I popped the tab on the can, took a drink.

  “I’m confused,” I said. “Did she or did she not want to see her husband dead? Did she or did she not set him up to die by placing a bullet inside the chamber of that Colt. 45? Did she or did she not insist that I encourage him to demonstrate precisely how a suicidal cop eats his piece? Was she or was she not convinced John was going to kill her… kill her tonight?”

  She exhaled, nodded, stared down at her sandaled feet.

  “Be careful what you wish for, Ethan,” she said. “As bad as he was to her, he was still her husband. She knows you’ve fallen in love with her. I know you’ve fallen in love with her.”

  “You’ve fallen too. But I love you at the same time. Do you think she loves us back?”

  She raised her head, looked me in the eyes.

  “I try not to think about it. I only know that as strange as the whole thing sounds, it’s happened.”

  I thought about Susan’s cell phone and the many texts she and Lana had been sending one another over the past few weeks. But now was not the time to start lobbing accusations that would only make my wife angry with me and put Lana on the defensive. Better to let things play out for a while. I had bigger fish to fry than worrying about who’s been screwing who for the past two months. Like keeping myself off death row, for instance.

  I said, “That plainclothes cop who just left… Detective Miller… he isn’t so convinced it was a suicide.”

  “Well, it wasn’t a suicide, was it?”

  I shot her a look while she bit down on her bottom lip. I wanted to slap her face. But then, she was right. It wasn’t a suicide. Not at all.

  “Miller admits John was a real asshole,” I said. “But not the type of asshole to blow his brains out at this stage of the life and career game, even though he was married to a woman with a known history of adultery.”

  She stared down at me with unblinking eyes. “There’s no way he can suspect anything. It’s a clear case of negligence. He was playing with his gun and he shot himself. Happens all the time. That’s our story before and that’s our story now.”

  Earlier inside the house, you and Lana made me feel like you were double-crossing me, blaming me not for John’s suicide, but his murder…

  She looked away, silently for a moment, the quiet filled up with the buzz of mosquitoes and the squirrels in the apple tree. But then she did something that made me feel a little better. She reached out, placed her hand on my shoulder. Tenderly.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s all going to be okay. Soon this will all be behind us and we can move away from Orchard Grove forever.”

  “Who exactly will move away from here? Just you and me?”

  “You, me, and Lana,” she said. “Just like we planned.”

  In my head, I heard and felt the report of that automatic and the back of John’s head spattering aga
inst the window and the wall.

  Susan turned, went for the door.

  “Susan,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “Earlier on,” I said, “why were you so cold to me? You made me feel almost guilty… Guilty of cold blooded murder.”

  Her beautiful face lit up in the moonlight.

  “But aren’t you, Killer?” she said.

  My foot throbbed. I should have had it elevated and iced. Instead I was drinking beer out on the porch of the man I murdered. Who the fuck was I fooling? Myself, and that’s all. At least, that’s the way I felt. Sure, Lana helped me plan out John’s death. She even instigated it. She needed John dead or face her own demise. And sure Susan knew all about it. But I was alone in this thing. What’s more, if it ever came out that John had forced my wife to perform some particularly dirty deeds with Lana at gunpoint, Miller could peg me with motive. Motive and means.

  After I finished my beer, Susan came back out, told me she would be staying with Lana tonight to keep her company. I asked her how Lana could even contemplate staying in that house of horrors for one more minute. But my wife just shook her head and explained that it’s precisely what she wanted. Even stranger than the thought of sleeping in that house where her husband’s brains were just blown out the back of his head, Lana wanted to reenter the gunroom to clean up the carnage. Wipe it clean of blood and brains. According to Susan, it would somehow make Lana feel better to play an active role in cleaning the place up. It would make her feel as though John’s death were real and not some bizarre dream that occurred earlier this evening. She could deal with the real. Put it behind her, eventually.

  I might have suggested to her that Miller wouldn’t think highly of her messing with a probable crime scene. But then, forensics had already scoured the place, so their evidence, whether it proved fruitful or not, was already collected, the necessary photos, already snapped. I also recalled Miller stating explicitly that his job was already “done here.”

  “Why don’t you go home and get some sleep,” Susan said. “In the morning, everything will seem more optimistic.”

  “Optimistic,” I snickered. What I wanted to tell her is I felt like my balls were trapped in a vice that was only getting tighter. No optimism in that.

  “Goodnight,” I said, pulling myself up by my crutches.

  “Goodnight, Killer,” she said, leaning into me, planting a kiss on my cheek that might have come from my sister if only I had a sister.

  But I didn’t leave right away.

  When she was gone I stood outside on the deck looking into the dining room and kitchen through the big picture window. I saw something that shocked me, but given everything that had gone down that day and during the previous two days, shouldn’t have shocked me at all. I saw my wife take Lana into her arms and hold her tightly. Lovingly. For a time, Lana just seemed like she needed a shoulder to cry on. Someone strong and understanding. At least, that’s what the once-upon-a-time-dedicated husband in me wanted to believe.

  After a few beats, I saw Lana lift her head and open her pouty mouth just a little. She and Susan gravitated toward each other, their mouths connecting. They kissed as passionately as two lovers can possibly kiss, each of them running their hands through one another’s hair, their tongues connecting, playing, exploring. After a time, Lana began to unbutton Susan’s blouse, while Susan lowered both her hands down to Lana’s bear thighs, and then slowly drew them up and into the underside of her short skirt.

  I turned away then, hiding myself from the window. My heart was beating fast again, and my throat felt like a rock had lodged itself inside it. What in God’s name was going on here? It was one thing for two girls to make out while their men were present and a loaded gun was involved. Or, a man, at least. But it was something else when they decided to enter into the sexual act on their own without the man or men.

  Susan… “I’m falling for you.”

  Lana… “Go with it.”

  In my overheated brain, it meant only one thing: Not only were they falling in love, but they were already in love, and what’s more, they were cutting me out of the equation.

  I made my way across the two fence lines, my foot throbbing, pulsing. Entering into the house by way of the back sliding glass doors, I flicked on the overhead lights, navigated the couple of steps up into the dining room, and poured a shot of whiskey. I downed that and poured another and drank that. Then I made my way to the bathroom off the master bedroom. All I wanted to do was wash up, clean my hands and face of John Cattivo’s blood, then get in bed and sleep a dreamless sleep for a thousand nights.

  Pulling off my button down shirt without bothering to unbutton it, I stood at the bathroom sink in my white undershirt and stared at myself in the mirror. I stared back at tired, bloodshot eyes, and a scruffy face that had seen better days. The roundness of my face that once upon a time seemed so youthful was now the precise feature that made me appear worn and old. The weight of guilt is said to be unbearable given time. But only a few hours had passed since John blew his brains out…rather, I blew them out for him…and already I felt like I was hefting ten times my own weight on each shoulder. That was the first time it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to give Miller a call and confess the whole damned affair. A confession might put me, Lana, and Susan behind bars for a lot of years, but at least the guilt would be gone.

  I turned on the cold water, splashed my face with it. My reflection stared back at me, dripping with water. I was the drowning man. Drowning in my own guilt, greed, and paranoia. Maybe I should have added a little anger to the soup as well. More than a little anger. Anger at Lana and Susan.

  At myself.

  I’d bitten the apple, and one way or another, I would pay the price. Maybe not in this life, but in the next.

  Turning off the water, I pulled the towel from the rack beside the sink, dried my face. Tossing the towel onto the counter, I looked back up into the mirror. It was then I made out the reflection of a second face framed inside the glass.

  The beam of Maglite shines into the Culvert. But with her eyes closed, she can’t see it, so much as sense the powerful light seeping through the water and through her thin-skinned eyelids. The water is foul, and it seeps into her nostrils. She can’t hold her breath forever. She needs oxygen. She can’t help herself. She begins to gag and choke. No choice but to lift her head from out of the water.

  “Help me!” she screams.

  Brad the cop is startled to hear the voice and see the female body it belongs to.

  “Detective Miller!” he shouts. “You’d better get down here right away!”

  For a guy with a bum foot, I swung around fast.

  He was standing just outside the door to the master bedroom in the dark.

  Detective Miller.

  “Hope you don’t mind my intrusion,” he said. “Your wife said I’d find you here. I rang the doorbell, called your cell. No answer either way.”

  Once my pulse leveled off, I slid my crutches under my arms, hobbled out of the bathroom, my face and hair still damp.

  “You gave me a real start,” I said, wondering how he knew he might find Susan next door. Perhaps he simply deduced it. Or maybe he wanted to check out the gunroom one final time.

  He smiled that smile again. The one that wasn’t really human.

  “You must be pretty jumpy after this evening’s drama,” he said, his hands shoved in his trouser pockets, the grip on his service automatic visible. Then, “Got anything to drink in this place?”

  “Thought cops weren’t supposed to drink on duty.”

  He looked at me with that cold, gray-eyed stare.

  “Wouldn’t you?” he said.

  We sat down across from one another at the dining room table. I set a drinking glass in front of him, and one in front of me. Rather than drag myself up and out of my chair every few minutes, I set the bottle of Jack on the table between the typewriter and the bowl of apples, easy access. Sitting myself down clumsily, I grabbe
d the bottle by its neck, poured the first round, set the bottle back down, hard.

  He said, “Must suck having a leg banged up like that, bleeding all the time. How’d it happen?”

  “Blame the mileage,” I said. “The football came back to haunt me. So did all that jogging. I split the plate down in the Amazon doing some research for a script. They put four permanent screws in the plate and removed a portion of the index toe. But they tell me I’ll be as good as new when I heal.”

  “Try and stay off it,” he said.

  “Thanks for the advice. But you ever gonna tell me what this surprise visit is all about?” I said, after a beat. “I just got through talking to you.”

  He drank his shot, went to pour another almost immediately, as if the act of emptying your glass and refilling it were not two separate acts but instead, one single fluid motion.

  “You mind?” he said, taking hold of the bottle.

  “You’re the cops,” I said. “Why should I mind?”

  More of that steely smile.

  “I like you, Ethan,” he said. “You’ve got spunk. Wish more of my support staff were like you.”

  “We’re back to a first name basis. You must want something from me.”

  “Course I do. Me and the great Empire State of New York.” He poured a shot, glanced at my glass, saw that it was full, capped the bottle and set it back down in the same exact spot in which it previously rested. “Why else would I be here?”

  We were dancing around one another and he knew it. Feeling one another out, waiting for someone to take the first jab. How did the old saying go? Sometimes in life you’re a hammer and other times you’re the nail. I don’t have to tell you what I felt like sitting there across from him.

  I drank some whiskey. Half the shot. The booze sank into me, warm, strong, and good. But the man who sat before me didn’t make me feel so good. Considering the circumstances anyway.

  “So what can I help you with, Miller?”

  “Ethan,” he said, “how well have you and your wife been getting along as of late?”