Orchard Grove Read online

  She stood up fast.

  “Crap,” she said, staring down at the wet fabric. “Coffee stains. Excuse me for a second, Ethan.” She quickly disappeared into the house.

  I sipped my coffee and stared at her phone. A little voice filled my head. It told me to quickly pick the phone up while I had the chance, check out her texts. Maybe there would be something interesting on there. Something that would shed some light on precisely who Lana Cattivo really was without my having to drag it out of her.

  I could hear the water running in the sink in the kitchen. The sink faced the dining room. She would have no way of seeing outside onto the deck while she was scrubbing the stain out of her robe sleeve. In a mere moment, the phone would lock up and my chance would be gone forever.

  I reached out, took hold of the phone.

  There were too many apps for me to take in all at once, so I went to the most obvious. The WhatsApp text message service. I opened it. There was a long list of photos. Faces from men and women whom I had no way of knowing. That’s not entirely right. I recognized the face of her husband. There was a text beside it. It said, “Working late. Wait up anyway.” Nice guy. The date was from two nights ago.

  I scrolled down.

  No one single face popped out at me.

  Then she turned off the faucet. My heart pounded and adrenalin filled my brain.

  I was about to quickly place the phone down on its face, when I saw a name. It said, “Susan.” I glanced at the photo that went with the name. It wasn’t a photo I’d ever seen before and since it was so small it wasn’t easy to make out. But for certain the Susan in question had long, thick brunette hair. If the Susan in question were my wife, I wouldn’t be entirely too surprised since they’d been sharing rides to the gym. I looked at the final message in a series of messages set beside the name. But it wasn’t typed text. It was instead, a voice message created by Lana.

  I heard footsteps crossing over the kitchen. In a matter of two seconds, Lana would be back. I hit the voice message anyway. The word, “Baby…” came out of the speaker. But it was all I could make out before I had to press the command that made the screen close and quickly set the phone back down in the same place where she’d set it a moment ago.

  I’d barely pulled my arm back when she reemerged out onto the deck.

  She stopped in her tracks.

  “Everything okay?” she said, her eyes veering from the phone to me and back to the phone again.

  “Sure,” I said, swallowing. “All good.”

  She nodded, grinned and sat herself back down.

  “I’ll bet you’re just dying to know everything there is to know about me, aren’t you, Ethan?”

  I was certain then that she’d seen me sneaking a peek at her phone. But then, if she had, she didn’t seem angry about it. She seemed suspicious and that’s all. The name “Susan” flashed into my brain. A Susan with dark hair, just like mine. How many millions of Susans were there in the world with black hair? Countless. A Susan whom Lana called, “Baby…” It could never be my Susan since the two only knew one another as acquaintances. You don’t refer to an acquaintance as “Baby” and you don’t refer to her as “Baby” if you’re another woman. Generally speaking anyway.

  “Yes,” I said, lifting my coffee, taking a sip, praying my hand wasn’t trembling too much. “I would love to get to know you more.”

  She licked her lips.

  “We’ll just have to see about that,” she said. “Maybe, if you’re lucky, we can be the bestest friends ever on Orchard Grove.”

  She’s calmly listening to this man with the horrible looking foot and the screenwriter brain lie through his teeth about sneaking a peek at her phone messages. Maybe he already suspects something about Susan. About she and Susan. Or perhaps it’s just his intuition speaking to him… what do writer’s call it? Their built-in shit detector. The detector telling him that something isn’t quite what it seems on quaint, suburban, Orchard Grove.

  But then, she knows for certain that he is madly in lust with her. It’s possible this lonely, has-been is falling in love with the fantasy he’s been watching from out of his bedroom window for weeks now. If only he knew the truth about Orchard Grove, about all the boys and men who also fell in lust and love with her all those years ago. If only he knew about their fate, he might not only think twice about sharing an innocent coffee with her, but also about spending so much time watching her. Christ, if he only knew the real truth, he’d pack the house up tonight, grab Susan by the hand, and move as far away from Orchard Grove as humanly possible.

  If only he knew the bloody truth.

  She sips her iced coffee, stares out at the old apple tree that occupies a slight incline, just beyond the fence-line. Miraculously, the tree still bears fruit. She recalls how her step-monster breathed his last only a few feet away from that tree. But then, she also recalls the next man. Was his name Brian? Or was it David? Just a thin, lonely, middle-aged man who arranged a date with her via the classifieds in the local arts and entertainment give-away news rag. It had been so easy.

  With only a few weeks to go before the trees were scheduled to be cut down to make way for the new Orchard Grove subdivision, she arranged to meet him there, to walk with her amongst the trees one final time.

  She packed a picnic lunch for him. Nothing special. Bologna sandwiches on sliced white bread slathered with ketchup. Bags of Lays potato chips. Homemade Toll House chocolate chip cookies… junk a thirteen-year-old girl likes to eat. She even included a can of Miller beer for him and a Tab for herself.

  At the time, she wasn’t entirely sure why she included the meat cleaver and the thin black can of Mace in the basket… what force or inner voice propelled her to place the items there. But soon after they started making out, he tried to put his hand in her pants. Instinct took over, and she took hold of the Mace and sprayed his face. He began to choke, his eyes wide and red and burning. He held out his hands as if to choke her, but she grabbed hold of the cleaver and chopped his left hand clean off.

  As soon as she chopped off the right hand at the wrist, her body became enveloped in that warm beautiful feeling, and for certain, she knew precisely why she brought the Mace and cleaver.

  They were instruments of her destiny.

  “But what about you?” she said after a time, repositioning her feet onto the chair beside her, focusing her face up toward the sun to catch the maximum amount of rays. “What movies have you written?”

  “Hasn’t Susan told you?” As soon as I posed it, I knew that the question was moot since Susan rarely if ever, talked about my writing anymore.

  She shook her head.

  I told her about the films and also about the one novel I’d written. A mystery that was quickly remaindered. She’d seen the films or most of them, but never heard of the novel. Which didn’t surprise me in the least.

  “Shouldn’t you still be living in LA?” she said.

  I admitted that I’d lived there with my first wife all throughout the Nineties and into the new century, but when the Internet shrunk the world, I figured I could make my move back east which I preferred. But what I didn’t tell her is that after my divorce and the hangover that followed, I could no longer afford Hollywood. I also left out the part about what a mistake it had been for me to separate myself from the studios and the agents who’d been buying my stuff for nearly ten years. Even optioning the scripts that often wouldn’t be produced. Maybe novels could be written from anywhere in the world, but screenwriters… serious scriptwriters and show runners… still needed to be in LA to make the deals and seal them, face-to-face.

  “How long have you and Susan been married?” she pressed on.

  I drank some more of the quickly cooling coffee. “Ten years, no kids. But then, Susan has probably told you that already also.”

  “Truth is, we haven’t talked much at all. We’ve discussed our P90X class and the asshole jock who runs it, if you’ll pardon my French. But that’s the extent of it. I�
��d really like to get to know her better.”

  I felt somewhat relieved that Susan hadn’t yet opened up about us… about our trouble as of late. “You married long?”

  “Long enough to know better,” she said. Then, as she stared up at the sun, “And the fire still burns for you and the missus, Ethan Forrester?”

  There it was again… the image of the name Susan on her WhatsApp. The name, the face and the long brunette hair.

  “You want the truth? Or the sugar-coated version?”

  She laughed. “So that’s why you spend your day staring out your bedroom window at the scantily clad wife of a top Albany cop?”

  I felt as if all my blood were about to spill out the fresh wounds in my foot.

  “Snagged,” I said. “Red-handed and red-nosed. You’ve seen me?”

  “You want the truth or the sugar-coated version?”

  “Very funny. How’d you know I was looking at you?”

  “Hard to miss you with your face pressed up against the glass like that.”

  “Hey, wait a minute. I’ve been trying to be careful about such things. At least, that’s what I’ve been telling myself, Lana.”

  Another giggle, not like we were discussing my voyeurism and hers, but as if we were talking over Toll House cookie recipes.

  “Don’t worry yourself over it,” she said, taking on a sly grin. “I kind of like it.”

  More of that electric jolt I’d been getting since first laying eyes on her inside her own backyard, as if she had her hand on a video-game-like controller and kept pressing the trigger.

  “Glad to be of service,” I said. “If you’ll excuse the cliché.”

  She drank some iced coffee, then gently set the glass back down on top of its own condensate ring. For a time we sat in silence. But with the insects buzzing around us and the gentle wind blowing the leaves on the trees and a dog barking in the near distance, it wasn’t all that silent.

  “Tell me,” she said after a long slow beat, turning so that she was once more staring at me through those dark sunglasses, “how many times per day do you rub that cock of yours when you’re staring at me?”

  The electric jolts now became a firestorm that erupted inside my entire body. Using the crutches as leverage, I stood up. Supporting myself with only one crutch shoved under my right arm, I shifted myself around the table, until I stood directly over her.

  “Careful, Ethan Forrester,” she said looking up at me. “I wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself.”

  I took a good look over my left shoulder and saw nothing but empty backyards, half blocked out by the fence. It was the same view over the other shoulder. Behind us, nothing but tall trees and scrub and my pot patch. I knew that if I didn’t make my move then, I might never get another chance.

  Taking hold of her arm, I lifted her out of her chair, took her in my arms, pressed my lips against hers. Her robe flew open as if she fixed it to happen that way, and I pulled my mouth away from hers and kissed her neck and her chest, until I took an erect nipple into my mouth, tasting the warm, sweet, sun-drenched skin.

  Pushing back her phone and coffee glass with my free hand, I balanced myself on my good leg and picked her up, setting her down onto the table. I reached out with both hands and grabbed hold of her black silk panties. I was pulling them off when I heard the distinct sound of a vehicle pulling up into the driveway.

  “Oh no,” she said from down on her back on the table. “John’s home.”

  Even with her husband about to barge in on us, it took all the strength I had left inside me to pull myself away from her while precariously balancing almost the entirety of my weight on one foot.

  She slid off the table, quickly rewrapped her robe around her waist, and tied the belt into a neat bow. As I stood there watching her, heart beating in my throat, something told me this wasn’t the first time Lana had been unexpectedly interrupted by her husband while she, shall we say, entertained another man.

  She sat herself back down in her chair and grabbed her glass of iced coffee. I also sat down, careful not to break the plastic-backed chair as I thrust myself into it, my bad foot extended before me. Luckily my coffee hadn’t spilled either, and as I was putting the mug to my lips, a man threw open the sliding glass door and walked out onto the deck.

  “Hope I’m not interrupting anything!” he barked.

  He was a man slightly taller than average height. Maybe an inch or so taller than me. But I pegged him for ten years younger and built with the powerful neck, shoulders, and arms of a weight lifter or former college fullback. For certain he was the man whose photographs occupied the far wall in the house’s TV room.

  He was wearing a black Oxford button-down that fit snuggly to his waist. Despite the obvious hours spent in the gym, his beer gut was even more obvious as it protruded beyond his brass military style belt buckle and pressed against shirt buttons that seemed on the verge of popping. I often wrote about cops in my scripts and I most definitely wrote about them in my one crime novel, so I was no stranger to their love of the bottle. This man was no exception.

  Like I said, he was ten or so years younger than me, but aging more rapidly than the average bear. He had a full head of dark hair and his face was scruffy while sporting the pink tint not of a sun worshipper like his wife, but instead of a daily alcohol abuser as opposed to an all-out dysfunctional alcoholic.

  With my hands wrapped around my now cooled coffee cup, I gazed up at him and neither smiled nor frowned. What he didn’t know was that I was holding onto the cup so that he didn’t notice them trembling. What I wouldn’t have given right then for my sunglasses to use not against the sun, but as a mask. Stealing a quick glance over my left shoulder, I could see that Lana had pressed her lips together to form a kind of odd smile. But it looked more like the expression someone would wear while a doctor repaired a hangnail on their big toe.

  He barged through the door with his blue jacket pushed far enough behind both his elbows for me to make out the inverted black grip on his 9mm Smith & Wesson service sidearm. With a broad but now very happy smile on his face, he approached the table and stopped just short of slamming into it with his thighs.

  Turns out he wasn’t alone.

  He was accompanied by a younger man who was both taller and thinner, but with a neck that looked like a tree trunk. He was also packing a sidearm which was holstered and clipped onto a black belt that held up gray slacks under a matching gray jacket. His hair was black and neatly cut and he was sporting an equally groomed mustache and goatee. His eyes were hidden behind aviator sunglasses so that I had no way of seeing what color or shape they were. But I did sense for certain they were looking not at me, but into me.

  “Hello, Carl,” Lana said to the man. Between the low-toned voice and the dead-pan way in which it was delivered, I could almost taste the tension between the two, as if in the short time the Cattivo’s had been in town she’d already managed to develop a history with this city cop, however short and sweet or sour.

  “Lana,” the man mumbled in an equally telling tone.

  “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend, Lana?” John said, his blue eyes locked not on his wife’s, but on mine.

  She cleared a frog from out of her throat.

  “John, this is our next door neighbor, Ethan,” Rachael said. “He’s professional writer. A real screenwriter and a novelist too.” And then, “Ethan, this is my husband, John, and his partner, Carl Pressman.”

  John noticed my crutches and the black boot-splint.

  “Don’t bother to get up,” he said.

  I held out my hand from where I was seated and John took hold of it. He shook it briskly and tightly not as a welcome, but purely as a demonstration of his strength, power, and dominance over me both as a man and an officer of the law. He held the hand for a second or two longer than men usually spend on a handshake, all the time locking eyes onto my own. When finally he released his grip, Carl leaned in and took my hand. His grip was firm but not as
firm as his partner’s. As opposed to John’s show of strength, Carl’s was more of an I don’t give a shit who you are because I won’t remember your name or face in a few minutes kind of shake.

  “Listen, John,” Carl said, “I’ll wait for you in the Suburban. I’ve got a bunch of calls to make that just can’t wait.” He nodded at me, and smiled at Lana. She smiled back at him, but the pleasant exchange was about as phony as the plastic chair I was sitting in. He left the way he came in, back through the sliding glass doors.

  “So a real screenwriter,” John said, pulling out the chair closest to him, sitting down. “You mean like a I’m-hoping-to-sell-a-movie-someday kind of real screenwriter, or you actually make money at what I consider a hobby for drunks and addicts who don’t want to work for a living? You know how many screenwriters I busted for DWIs down on the Strip alone? Goddamned West Coast freak show.”

  “Don’t be rude, John,” Lana said. “You don’t even know him.”

  He turned to her quick. “And you do, sweetheart? Or were you planning on getting to know him better when I’m not around?”

  To say I was sensing some real tension in the air was putting it lightly. It didn’t take an Einstein or an APD detective to see that the Cattivo’s were having a little trouble with their marriage these days. Dawned on me suddenly that the trouble in question might be the real reason behind their move upstate.

  Lana added, “I think we’ve seen a few of Ethan’s films, back when we lived in Venice.”

  “That so,” John said. “How come you’re not living in West Hollywood on the corner of Gregory and Peck like the rest of those jerkoffs?”

  “John!” Lana snapped. “Please.”

  He shot me a smile again, as if to portray himself as happy when, in fact, he was seething inside. Seething because his half-naked wife was hanging out with scriptwriter from next door, and by the looks of it, John had had a bellyful of scriptwriters as a Santa Monica cop. Can’t say I blamed him.