Everything Burns Read online

  “You knew David was having trouble? That he was sick?”

  She wipes the tears from her face with the backs of her hands. She nods, regretfully.

  “Yes, I knew,” she admits. “You writers. You will literally drive yourselves to the edge of sanity to get what you want. David went too far with his obsession over your success. Now this.” With an open hand she gestures at the smoldering fire. A fire that was begun not by Bourenhem but by me, fighting fire with fire. “I wonder what my attraction to writers is all about?” she adds, not without a bitter laugh.

  “Had he been diagnosed with pyromania or something like it?”

  She shakes her head. “Not officially, like in your case. I’m not even sure his problem was fire, necessarily. But it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to spot depression, obsession, anger, and psychosis. He was seeing someone. A professional. I even paid for the sessions for a while. Then he stopped going. Soon after that, you came back into my life and I broke up with him for good.”

  “But you knew he was mentally unstable and still you gave him a key after having the locks changed?” It’s a question I pose while recalling the many books of mine stacked on his apartment shelves, the pine casket lifted right out of The Damned.

  “Yes, I knew he was growing unstable. But not dangerously so. Or maybe I just didn’t want to believe it.”

  “He seemed so sweet,” I say, putting her own words back in her mouth. “He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  “Yes, I truly believed that. The last thing I ever thought David was capable of was hurting another human being. And I mean that with all my heart, Reece.”

  She’s tearing up again. Now is not the time to keep on pushing her about Bourenhem’s psychosis and her decision to grant him access to her keys. What difference does any of it make at this point anyway? He’s dead.

  Once more I look into her wet eyes. Eyes that are swelled, the sockets slightly black and blue from the tear duct surgery.

  “They look better,” I say. “They really do.”

  “What looks better?”

  “Your eyes. The doc did a good job. No more excessive tearing.”

  “Oh damn,” she says, placing both hands to her cheeks. “I’ve forgotten about my eyes. I’m supposed to be on my back icing them.”

  “Don’t worry. Now that this is all over, we’ll get you home and get you some ice cubes. Your eyes aren’t the only thing that needs healing right now.”

  I pull her back into me and once more hold her tightly. Over her shoulder, I look at the EMS vans, at the cop cruisers, at the gathering of reporters and nosy neighbors. I look at the dark woods off in the distance. That’s when a wave of ice-cold water washes over me.

  I pull away from Lisa.

  “For the love of God,” I say. “Anna . . . Anna is gone.”

  Chapter 78

  Lisa turns in the direction of the EMS vans. She looks one way and then the other. Anna is nowhere to be seen.

  “I told her to sit right there and not move an inch,” she says, pointing to the back of the first van, the doors to which are wide open, the interior light shining down on the now-empty back bumper. “But then she ran off to play with the firemen.”

  “Anna!” I shout.

  But I get nothing in return.

  I take a step forward, toward the second van that’s parked further away in the semidarkness. I spot three gurneys set beside it. Two of the gurneys still support bodies. The third one, however, is empty.

  “Rachael,” I say. “Rachael took Anna.”

  I’m running toward the burning house and the police who are still working the exterior scene. I find Burly Cop standing beside Miller while the detective talks into his cell phone pressed up against his right ear.

  “Anna’s gone,” I bark. “So is Rachael.”

  Miller tells whoever he’s talking to that he’s got to call them back.

  “That’s impossible. Rachael’s dead,” he says, pocketing his cell phone.

  “No she’s not and she’s got Anna.” I’m shouting now. “Look at the gurney.”

  He does, then turns to Burly Cop. “Round up your men and search the property perimeter. We have a possible abduction and murder suspect fleeing the scene. A very alive suspect.”

  Weapons and Maglites drawn, a team of cops begin searching for my daughter in the woods that create the private perimeter beyond the iron fence around both sides and the back of the Reynoldses’ estate. A second team of officers enter through the open back gate to start searching the big backyard and pool area. Pulling his cell phone back out, Miller calls in an official AMBER Alert to APD dispatch.

  “Go to your wife,” he insists. “She needs you.” It’s the first time he hasn’t referred to Lisa as my ex-wife.

  I see Lisa standing there all alone, her arms tightly crossed over her chest, the tears streaming from her tender eyes. Part of me wants to go to her, comfort her. But another part of me wants to head into the woods along with the cops. I want to put this thing with Rachael right, once and for all. To do that, I will steal back my daughter first, then I will take hold of Rachael’s neck with my two bare hands and break it.

  I’m about to head into the dark woods beyond the southern perimeter of the front lawn when I hear her ravaged voice.

  “Don’t come any closer,” Rachael insists. “Or I swear I’ll slice her open.”

  Chapter 79

  All time stops dead as Rachael appears from out of the woods, holding on to my little girl.

  Rachael has Anna in a choke hold with one arm and with the other she’s holding something up against Anna’s frightened, tear-strewn face. Miller shines his Maglite onto them and in the bright white beam I can plainly see that the object is a gleaming silver carving knife.

  Fire has reduced Rachael’s clothing to charred and tattered rags. Her hair is completely burned away. The left side of her face is burned almost beyond recognition, while the other side appears to be untouched. Her black bikini underwear is visible, and from the way she’s limping, she’s suffered a break in her left foot or ankle. How she was mistaken for dead is beyond me, but I suppose the firemen had no choice but to work swiftly. Unconscious and as badly burned as she is, it would’ve been easy enough to mistake her for dead. She still looks dead, like a zombie with a death grip on my daughter.

  I can see Rachael’s one remaining blue eye peering not at me, but into me. Into my heart and soul.

  “You took something from me, Reece,” she says. “You stole my life and now I’m going to steal something from you. Do you understand me? I’m going to cut your daughter’s neck and I’m going to paint the earth with her blood. It will be my dying masterpiece, and I will dedicate it to you.”

  She positions the knife so that it’s pointed directly at Anna’s neck. She’s about to plunge the knife through it.

  “No!” Lisa screams.

  I lunge forward, as if it’s possible to tackle her from a distance of twenty or more feet away.

  Then a gunshot rings out.

  Chapter 80

  An exit wound almost magically appears close to the center of Rachael’s forehead. It’s about the size of a charcoal briquette. She wobbles for a moment, her one eye still locked on mine. The knife falls from her hand as she issues me the slightest of smiles on the portion of mouth that still functions. Her lips move in a way that says I still love you only an instant before she collapses onto her face.

  Anna screams and runs for her mother, who is already running toward her.

  “I’m coming out,” comes the deep voice of a man.

  It’s Blood stepping from the woods.

  Dressed entirely in black, he blended perfectly into the woods’ darkness. He’s holding high over his head the automatic he just used to kill Rachael, surrendering.

  Blood is one hell of a shot.

  Miller jogs
over to him, gesturing at the other cops to stand down and hold their fire. “I’ve got this,” he insists. He retrieves the automatic from Blood, whose hands are still held high.

  I take a few steps forward, so that I’m standing only a few feet away from the Sentinel of Sherman Street. “How will I ever thank you, Blood?” I say.

  “You don’t,” he says. “We got one another’s backs, you know that. But you might answer your text messages now and then.”

  “I’ve got to book you, Blood,” Miller says. “You know that, right?”

  “You got a job to do, Detective,” Blood says, now lowering his hands and positioning them behind his back so that Miller can cuff him. “So by all means, proceed. Bail cash will be no problem and by then the charges will be dropped. Can’t say I’m comfortable with shooting a woman in the back of the head. But it had to be done.”

  Miller cuffs him, then turns to Burly Cop. “Take him downtown and put him in my office,” he instructs.

  Burly Cop nods. “Come on, Blood. Looks like I’m giving you a lift.”

  “We stop for coffee on the way? Me being a hero and all.”

  “You buying?”

  “You cops all the same,” Blood says, throwing me a wink. “Don’t worry ’bout nothing, Reece,” he adds. “You all safe now.”

  I feel hot blood rushing through my veins, my heart throbbing. It’s been the longest day and night of my life. Sad to say, as guilty as Rachael and David were, I know I’m not without my own guilt. Bourenhem was right. I did want to see him burn, and I did get pleasure out of seeing it happen. Real, physical pleasure. That’s also how the world works. How it sadly and tragically works.

  That’s a fact that will burn in my soul for the rest of my days.

  Chapter 81

  Four days later the three of us return to Lisa’s house. We’ve just buried her father at the Albany Rural Cemetery and returned Victoria to the new apartment we’ve secured her at one of those brand-new high-end senior living communities that are springing up all over upstate New York these days.

  While Anna cradles Frankie in her arms and immediately proceeds to her bedroom along with her headphones and iPod, Lisa kisses me gently on the cheek, tells me she’s going to take a very long and sweet nap. “No calls,” she insists with a smile. “No interruptions. Not even from God.”

  “I’ll try and control myself,” I say.

  I stand in the middle of the kitchen floor. The house is quiet but not silent as the familiar sounds of the girls tending to their various relaxing habits in their separate bedrooms fill the warm indoor spaces. The place has been cleaned from top to bottom since the break-in Bourenhem and Rachael partnered up on more than half a week ago. The break-in in which Rachael drew my image on the chalkboard wall, the barrels of a double-barreled shotgun shoved into my mouth and discharged, the back of my head blowing off in a spray of brain, blood, and bone. I should have known then that Rachael had to be involved. The artwork was just too good.

  I go to the refrigerator, find a cold beer, and take a deep drink, then wipe the foam from my mouth with the back of my hand and set the can onto the counter. Looking off into the living room, I see a line of paperback novels on the metal bookshelf against the far wall. All five of them are mine. Drop Dead, Action/Reaction, Death Do Us Part, Killer Be Mine, and of course, my all-time best seller—the novel that outsells them all combined—The Damned.

  As my eyes lock on to the spine of the book, the dark background and gray block lettering spelling out “The Damned” and “Reece Johnston,” I don’t feel the small surge of pride I normally do when I eye one of my books. I feel only fear. Like the book no longer belongs to me. Like the book has become a stranger, and a malevolent one at that.

  I go to grab hold of my beer again and nearly tip it over. My hand is shaking. In fact, both my hands are trembling. Drawing a deep breath, I try to calm myself down. But then, knowing exactly what it is I have to do, I exhale and walk the few steps to the basement door, like a condemned killer on his way to face a firing squad.

  Flicking on the light, I descend the stairs into the basement. I go left, make my way over the carpeted floor of Anna’s playroom to the laundry room. Stored on the aluminum shelves pushed up against the concrete-block wall beside the washer and dryer are the dozen or so white banker’s boxes containing drafts of my manuscripts, each box dated and labeled under both working and final titles.

  Swallowing something dry and bitter, I cross the room and stand before the boxes. The banker’s box that’s set on the very top shelf to the immediate left contains all the drafts of my very first novel. Written not while Lisa and I were married, but after we’d finally separated. How the words suddenly came to me after having been blocked for so long is still a mystery to me. I have absolutely no memory of how I managed my miraculous escape from the writer’s-block prison where I would sit down at my keyboard and stare into an eternal whiteness that screamed, “Nada!”

  Looking around the room, I locate one of the little wooden chairs that goes to an old tea set Anna used to play with back when she was in kindergarten and I was living somewhere else. I carry the chair over to the shelf and step up onto it, praying it can hold me. It does, long enough for me to pull down the first white box. I step down off the chair, set the heavy, dusty box onto the naked concrete floor, take a knee, and open the lid.

  At the very top of the box are several early drafts of The Damned, including a copy of the clean “final” version I sent on to my agent who, in turn, sold it to the big publisher in New York for two hundred fifty thousand dollars. I push the final version to one side and pull the top title sheet off one of the early drafts.

  There’s a sheet of blank white paper underneath it. And a sheet of blank white paper under that, and under that. I pull out a chunk of manuscript from the middle of the book and it, too, is blank.

  Shifting my hand to another early draft, I yank off the title sheet and once again find nothing but a stack of white paper. My head spins, and my mouth goes dry. I pull out the final manuscript version, set it onto the floor. Reaching back into the box, I dig through several more sets of blank drafts until I come to yet another, smaller box that’s buried at the very bottom. It’s a box that houses nearly a full ream of paper. My hands trembling, I pull the lid off the box and stare at the title of the novel and the name of the writer who authored it.

  The Damned

  by

  David Bourenhem

  My heart sinks, my eyes fill with tears.

  He was right all along. I did betray him. I did betray them all. Most of all, I betrayed myself.

  Heretic . . .

  “It was the shock treatment,” Lisa says from the open laundry room door, sending a shot of hot adrenaline up and down my backbone. “The shock treatment makes you forget. That’s why you don’t remember stealing the novel. That’s why you don’t remember any of it, Reece. Your rages, your threats, your power over us both.”

  I shake my head.

  “I don’t understand,” I whisper, my brain buzzing, burning.

  “Of course you don’t understand. The shock treatments made you forget so much about the past, you even forgot that you couldn’t write anymore.” She laughs. But it’s a sad, cold laugh. “You did, however, find yourself fully capable of authoring a best seller like The Damned, even if you aren’t really the man who wrote it.”

  A single tear runs down my face, falls off my chin onto the manuscript.

  “But I did write those other novels, didn’t I? Tell me I wrote those other books, Lisa.”

  “You did, Reece. You did write them.”

  I nod, expecting a rush of relief that doesn’t come. Because it’s The Damned that matters. “Leese, tell me I wrote it too. Tell me I wrote The Damned. That what I’m looking at in this box is all a mistake. Tell me you’re lying.”

  “Think, Reece,” she says. “Thi
nk real hard. Do you have any recollection at all of writing it?”

  I struggle to stand on weakened knees. Grab the dryer for stability. I try to think. In my head, I see myself writing. But what I can’t see are the fingers on my two hands creating The Damned on the keyboard. It’s impossible to relive the experience. I can see myself writing the novels that followed. But not The Damned. When I attempt to recollect the process, I don’t see a man sitting at his laptop, his fingers pushing the keys that create words and sentences. Instead I see a man pushing the keys on a laptop that copy exactly the words already typed out on a thick manuscript set beside him. Maybe that’s why I don’t recall writing The Damned. Maybe I don’t want to remember writing . . . copying it. Maybe I’ve tried to erase the memory from my mind.

  “David wrote The Damned,” I say.

  In my head I see his apartment, the floor littered with manuscripts. Stacks of them. I see his shelves covered with editions of my novels and no one else’s.

  I shake my head again, as if the action will help me to accept the truth.

  “That’s right, Reece. David wrote The Damned, based on the information I fed him about your pyromania,” she goes on. “He sent it to me to read months after we got reacquainted on Facebook. You were immediately jealous of him, not because he was falling in love with me, but because I was reading someone else’s novel when you couldn’t write one of your own.”

  Me, just shaking my head. Still not believing what I’m hearing, but somehow believing it too.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “I know you don’t, Reece. The memory has been erased. Either by the shock treatments, or because you’ve done your best to erase it.”

  “But why would he allow me to steal it?”

  She exhales, looks down at the floor. “You caught us in an affair,” she says, her voice so low I can barely hear her. She forces herself to look up at me, to look into my eyes. “You broke into the bedroom. You were supposed to be at a mystery conference in New York City. But halfway there you turned around. You couldn’t get yourself to attend because you were ashamed about your writer’s block. You came home unannounced and you caught us together. You pointed a gun at us. For a brief second, I thought you were actually going to kill us. But instead, you lowered the gun and began to cry. Then, you simply turned, walked out, and drove away. The next day you pulled up with a van, and you moved out.”