Animosity (4 page)

I chuckled.

“Anywhooo,” the old woman said then, in a singsong tone, “we’ll talk again soon, Andy. I’m off to watch Dr. Phil. I never miss his show!”

“Take care of yourself, Mona,” I said.

Norman barked once, as if he also wished Mona nothing but the best, and Miss Pretty darted for the house.

“Now, Miss Pretty,” I heard the old woman scold the cat as they headed back inside, “You know Norman wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

We continued down the block. I whistled as I walked. Before long I felt droplets of sweat beading upon my brow. I wiped them away with the back of one hand.

“Whew, Norman,” I said. “It’s gonna be a hot one today.”

It wasn’t until we came within a hundred feet or so from the end of the street, where Poinsettia Lane merged into Brookshire Boulevard, the highway leading into town, when my dog began to act… well, not like himself at all
.

The retriever stopped in his tracks. His ears perked up. He sniffed the air, and a menacing growl rumbled deep in his throat like the threat of a storm on the horizon.

The hair on my arms and the nape of my neck stood up.

“Norman?” I said. “What’s the matter, boy?”

Up ahead, to our left, sat the construction site of a new home at 229 Poinsettia Lane. There wasn’t much to it yet save for a plot of thick red dirt, a concrete foundation, and the partial frame of what would soon be a fancy split-level similar to Doc McFarland’s place across the street. I’d heard a family with the same last name as a recent President had purchased the property (the Clintons? the Bushes? I was pretty sure it hadn’t been the Reagans), but for the life of me I couldn’t remember which one. A high wooden fence surrounded the site. To the left of the rutted driveway, which served as the construction crew’s entrance, a large sign with fancy lavender script proclaimed COMING SOON: ANOTHER BEAUTIFUL SUNN-FLOUER HOME.

Norman usually ignored the lot any time we passed it, even when it grew busy with dusty orange Brannon Bros. Construction trucks constantly coming and going, with sweaty men in hard hats hammering and sawing and pouring cement into the evening hours. That morning, the crew had not yet arrived to begin their work, which was why Norman’s behavior shocked me even more than it would have otherwise.

By the time we’d arrived within twenty feet of the place, Norman erupted into a mad flurry of barks. He lunged forward, standing on his hind legs when his leash did not allow him to go any further.

He nearly jerked my arm out of its socket wanting to get onto that lot.

“Damn it, Norman, what’s gotten into you?” I said. “Stop it!”

I picked up my pace, jogging behind him to keep a hold on his thin metal chain. I feared it might snap any second.

“Norman,
stop!
” I shouted it this time.

Still, he paid me no mind. He seemed to have forgotten I was there at all. His barks tapered off into harsh growls as we reached the construction site, and I stumbled through the gate behind him.

“God, Norman… what
is
it?”

Never before had I heard the retriever make such vicious sounds. He was always so well-mannered, the best dog in the world. Not even in the presence of my ex-wife’s new beau had he ever displayed such ferocity, and to say Norman hated that man would have been the understatement of the century.

My heart slammed in my chest as he tugged me across the lot, past a blood-red wheelbarrow and a trio of crooked sawhorses. As the skeletal frame of the Clintons’ new home loomed above us—yeah, that was it, the Clintons
,
but why did I remember that
now,
when I couldn’t possibly care any less?—I suddenly realized something that made me feel cold, even though the day blazed bright and warm…

I was
afraid.

Not in the way my favorite horror movies had filled me with harmless thrills when I was a kid. No, this was true
fear.
I realized I did not want to go any further. I did not want to see what had upset Norman so.

Because somehow I knew—already—that what we were about to find on the lot would be
bad.
Very bad.

I tugged on Norman’s leash. “Come on, boy. Let’s go. We’re not supposed to be here anyway…”

He didn’t seem to hear me. Still growling, he stalked across the construction site, toward the rear of the property, where a thin copse of trees separated our neighborhood from Harris City Park on the next street over.

“Norman? What the hell is wrong with you? What do you see?”

His growl cut short. He stood there, stiffly, staring at something across the lot. His nostrils flared.

“
Norman.
”

He glanced back at me, let out a little whine. His tail went limp, dangled between his legs as he took two tentative steps forward. Then he looked back at me again. Barked once. This time his bark was directed my way, but it wasn’t a threatening sound. It was a yelp of concern. A warning… as if he did not want me to come any closer.

I peered off toward the rear of the lot, holding one hand to my brow to shield my eyes from the sun. “Norman—”

And then I saw it. Up ahead. In the shadows of those trees…

Norman’s leash dropped from my hand.

A cool breeze swirled about the property. Off to my left, a gold candy bar wrapper twitched and danced across the dirt like something dying. Where scant minutes ago I had wiped sweat from my forehead, I shivered now. I felt the icy prickle of goosebumps rising on my forearms.

From somewhere far away, I could still hear Norman whining. It was a pitiful, hopeless sound.

“Norman,” I said. “S-stay. Stay right there.”

My knees grew weak. Still… somehow… I staggered forward. Toward the pale, crooked thing lying in the far corner of the construction site.

The world seemed to drop out from under me when I saw her sprawled there, in a big pile of sand behind a rusty cement mixer.

I covered my mouth with one hand. Salty tears blurred the awful sight before me, but they weren’t enough. Dear God, they would never be enough to make
this
go away…

“Oh, Jesus,” I said. “Jesus… ”

She was naked. Dead.

She could have been no older than nine or ten.

It was obvious from the unnatural angle of her head that her neck had been broken. A wormy rivulet of bright red blood ran from one nostril down to her chin, like an ugly crack in the face of an otherwise perfect porcelain doll.

Something else trickled out of her, too. Something thick and milky.

Down there.

Overhead, a bird chirped in the treetops. It was a maddening sound, a midsummer song far too merry for the scene at hand. From the Tomblins’ yard next door came the staccato chattering of an automatic water pistol, accompanied by a woman’s shrill laughter and pretend pleas for mercy. From further down the block: the high-pitched giggle of a toddler, in time with the metallic
squeak
-sigh-
squeak
-sigh of a backyard swing-set.

Meanwhile, my pulse banged in my temple like a tympani drum, louder than everything else.

Norman brushed against me. I flinched. Swayed. My breath burst out of me in a sick wheeze.

“Norman—”

The retriever’s eyes were sad, watery, as he crept toward the dead girl.

“Norman, no… d-don’t—”

He started licking her left foot.

I turned, vomited into a pile of discarded two-by-fours, and I didn’t stop making that same high-pitched whining noise my dog had been making minutes ago until I was all the way home, clamoring up the steps of my front porch, stumbling for the phone.

In the prologue to my fifth novel,
A Cold, Dark Place
, a man finds the mutilated corpse of a little Asian boy shoved into a culvert behind his place of business as he closes up shop on Christmas Eve. Though he did not know the child, I remember describing the character’s terror as “a devastating sense of
loss
.” In that boy’s glazed, lifeless eyes, the man saw the inevitable mortality of his own small children. He recognized the depths of evil to which humans are capable of descending, and with his discovery came “an awful, black knowledge” that no one is ever truly
safe
. Not even the innocent.

I felt an inexplicable sense of déjà vu as I sat there in my living room, tormented by what I had found that morning. As if I had personally experienced all of this before. And I felt regret. A smothering depression like I had somehow brought this upon myself, as if I had
created
the events of this day by penning something similar eleven years before.

I shuddered. I kept seeing that little girl’s tiny white face. Her fixed gray pupils staring through me into eternity. Over and over and over again, replaying in my mind like a clip from some misogynistic film I had watched in spite of my better judgment and now prayed I could forget…

Two hours had passed since I found her, and still I heard the obscene rasp of my golden retriever’s coarse tongue lapping across the soft, dead flesh of her heel.

“Samantha,” I wept. “Oh, Sam… ”

Not since the day she was born had I so desperately wanted to hold my own daughter, to hug her and squeeze her and promise her I would never let go. I cursed myself for postponing our weekend together, for worrying about some stupid book when I should have savored every precious second I was allowed to spend with her. Guilt gnawed at my soul with hateful, razor-sharp fangs, but at the same time I found myself burning up inside with a primal, white-hot rage. No one would ever put his hands on my Samantha like someone had put his filthy hands on that poor child at the Clinton property…

Sweet Jesus, who could
do
such a thing?

I ran one trembling hand through my sweat-stiff hair, made a sound somewhere between a furious growl and a tortured moan.

In my right ear then, a deep male voice: “Sir?”

I could barely stop myself from lashing out at the faces looming over me. For the last few minutes, I had almost forgotten that I was not alone.

“Whoa. Easy there. You sure you’re gonna be okay, Mr. Holland?”

I took a deep breath. Forced myself to calm down and deal with the task at hand.

“Yeah,” I said. “I think so.” My voice was hoarse. “I don’t know.”

“Can we get you a glass of water? Maybe even something stronger, if you’d like to show us where you keep it?”

“N-no. Water. Please. Water sounds good. Thank you.”

I sat on my sofa, chewing on my bottom lip, my right knee bouncing up and down nervously. The two men who had been talking to me for the past hour or so were Detectives Erik Norton and Paul Hembry. Detective Norton was tall, thin, a couple years younger than myself. His ebony hair was unkempt; it belied his otherwise professional appearance, as if he had been too busy fighting crime all morning to worry about something so trivial as running a comb through his hair. He wore a navy blue blazer over a light gray shirt and black jeans. Shiny gold badge clipped to his belt, the bulge of a gun under one arm. His partner, Paul Hembry, was an overweight, balding gentleman who barely stood as tall as my chest. Hembry sported multiple chins and dark bags under his eyes that gave him the appearance of a tired old bulldog. He wore a rumpled blue Polo shirt, khaki slacks, and enough cologne to drown a small army. Every few minutes he dabbed at his sweaty forehead with a yellow handkerchief plucked from his back pocket.

Also on the premises lurked a fellow by the name of Officer Keith Whitmire. Whitmire stood watch on the other side of my front door while his superiors handled their business inside with me. Every few minutes I heard his footsteps on the porch, saw his wide shoulders pass by the window as he paced back and forth out there. Not only had he been the first officer on the scene, Whitmire was a neighbor of mine. He lived in the Spanish-style bungalow at the end of the cul-de-sac. Though I'd never gotten to know him very well, I had heard he worked in law enforcement simply because he enjoyed it, to maintain familial tradition as a fourth-generation police officer, and not out of necessity. Supposedly he had won a hefty chunk of change in the Georgia State Lottery several years ago, and now he was set for life. I always thought Whitmire looked just like Pete Rose, the shamed baseball player.

Someone coughed gently, startling me from my reverie. It might have been me. I wasn’t sure.

“Can I, uh, get that glass of water now?” I asked the two men before me.

“Sure,” said Detective Norton. Without taking his eyes off of me, he told his partner, “Get him a glass of water.”

Detective Hembry nodded my way before waddling down the hall and into my kitchen. He returned a minute or two later with one of my daughter’s favorite drinking glasses, a pink one with Minnie Mouse and Daisy Duck on the side.

Ice cubes chattered against the sides of the glass as he handed it to me. I took a sip, winced. The water tasted thick and nasty in my mouth. Like something gone bad.

Norton crossed his arms, cleared his throat. Watched my every move. The look on his face suggested I was making him late for an important appointment.