As I Die Lying (37 page)

Why shouldn’t I? I knew that someone had to
die before sundown.

The telephone rang. I picked it up.

“
Richard Coldiron?” came a
familiar reedy voice.

“
Yes?”

“
This is Detective Frye. I
was wondering if you could come down to the station
today.”

“
Is something
wrong?”

“
No, no. Just have a few
questions to ask you.”

“
What about?”

“
About the death of Monique
Rivers. Thought you might help me fill in some of the blanks. We’ve
got a person of interest.”

“
Sure. But it would be
simpler if you just waited for my autobiography to come
out.”

“
Funny. You’re a
writer?”

“
I don’t know. Would it make
me a suspect?”

“
Writers are known to be
crazy, unless they’re bestsellers. Then they’re just
strange.”

“
Okay, Detective, I welcome
the chance to assist you and prove I’m not crazy, but I can hardly
wait to be strange. I’ve been rejected 117 times.”

“
Wow,” he said, though there
was not a hint of “wow” in his voice.

“
But I’m revising as I go
and–”

“
I appreciate it. Is
ten-thirty okay?”

“
Fine.”

“
See you here, then.
Bye.”

The dial tone buzzed in my brain, stirring up
Mister Milktoast. “What are we going to do, Richard?”

“
We
aren’t going to do anything.
I’m
going to think about what I want
to do.”

“
Do you think Frye
knows?”

“
He only knows what the
Insider lets him know. I wouldn’t be surprised if the bastard was
just trying to amp up the tension to keep us all juiced for the
climax.”

“
Is it time,
then?”

“
It’s time,” said
Bookworm.

It was nine o’clock. By the time I dressed,
the snow had completely covered the ground, a soft white shroud on
the skin of the earth. I sat at my desk and looked out at the
shadowed ancient mountains. Their peaks were capped like sharp
teeth.

I folded the paper and slid it into an
envelope, fearing that the Insider would stop me at any moment.
This was its flesh, after all, finally, ultimately, forever. Past,
present, future.

“
Seal it with a kiss for me,
Richie.”

“
Sure thing,
Loverboy.”

I wrote “Mother” on the outside of the
envelope and went downstairs. The house was peaceful, empty. Mother
must have rolled back into her stuporous slumber. The aquarium
glugged on, oxygenating the water that held no life but scum.

Shelley Birdsong was dreaming her everlasting
dream in a distant basement. Monique had cashed her check for the
bit part, wandered out of the script and on to other roles where
she would play the minor romantic interest. Brittany would never
know how close she’d come to celebrity, and she’d probably live out
her life married to some Alpha male psycho instead of ending up on
the victim list of whatever snazzy name the press would give me
after I got caught. I could afford a moment’s nostalgia, but I was
spiritually bankrupt.

“
Nobody’s vault but yours,”
Mister Milktoast whispered.

Bookworm tried to send a tear down my cheek.
I left the letter by a half-empty bottle of bourbon where Mother
would be sure to find it. I stopped at the front closet and put on
my coat. The Insider checked to make sure the knife was still in
the front pocket.

It’s not the end, Richard. It’s never the
end.

“
No, it’s not the end. Just
good-bye for now.”

I wasn’t leaving. I was going. Icarus in a
no-fly zone, Ishmael in a paper boat, Cupid playing Russian
roulette with a squirt gun.

Every door has “Exit” on one side and
“Entrance” on the other. Depends on whether you’re inside or
outside.

Me, I could never tell the difference.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Storytelling tradition demands that you hide
your transitions, that the ventriloquist’s mouth doesn’t move, that
the stitches on the B-movie monster costume don’t show. Sleight of
hand is for sissies, something those cotton candy-assed “literary
writers” pull while they’re in their Parisian garrets jacking off
to James Joyce. I told you I was a liar right from the beginning,
but you didn’t believe me. Fuck. I might as well have said, “I love
you.” You’d fall for that one, too, wouldn’t you?

I know I have. Every single time.

We only see what we want to see, only hear
what we want to hear. And though this is my autobiography, you
maintained the illusion that somehow you were part of the story,
that without you this was merely some words on paper. That my life
had no meaning until you made your interpretation.

You know something? I think you’re right.

So let’s finish it.

Downtown was desolate. Half of Shady Valley’s
shops had closed early because of the weather. Christmas lights
spasmed in pulses of green and red from the storefronts, vomiting
color onto the snow-covered sidewalks. Decorations sagged from
telephone poles, silver-tinseled bells tangled with loose red
ribbons. Cars lined the streetsides, cowering under the weight of
the storm like mastodons caught by a sudden ice age.

The roads were completely blanketed, except
for twin sets of black stripes made by the few cars that were out.
I peered through the windshield, driving mostly by memory as the
wipers beat like frozen drumsticks. The surrounding mountains were
white, silent, elegant temples, all granite and ice and bare trees.
The sun cowered behind the clouds, throwing the sky into early
twilight.

Nearly four inches of snow were on the ground
by the time I reached Beth’s apartment. Her building was empty.
Most of the people who lived in this section of town were students
who had left for the holiday. The whole street seemed dead, but the
peace was tense, like those hours just before Christmas morning
when the world is ready to explode with song and laughter. Or like
a battlefield where armies are waiting for the smoke to clear so
they can clash again.

I let myself in with the key Beth had given
me. I flipped the switch, but she must have already had the power
turned off. The living room was so cold that I could see my breath,
even in the weak light. Cardboard boxes were stacked in one corner
near the door. I walked past them to Monique’s old room.

The emptiness of it taunted me. A shiver
crawled across the loops of my intestines. It had to have been a
dream. That couldn’t have been us.

Never us. Only you.

“
No.”

“
She didn’t love us,”
Bookworm said. “It was the Insider, making her pretend. Making you
pretend, Richard.”

“
You’re right, Bookworm. She
could never love us. That was all a trick. Hear that, Insider?
We’re not playing your damn game anymore. Take your ball and go
home.”

Richard, my loving, loyal host. My dear
faithful servant. My brother. My father. My SON.

You will do as I say, when I say, no matter
what I say.

“
No. You can make me murder.
You can make me feel guilty. You can make me hate you. But you
can’t make me not love.”

The Insider was rising fast, poking its
orange spears of pain through my flesh. My brain was a cauldron of
simmering tar. My Little People were in pain, too. There would be
no more hiding under beds and in closets. It was time to clean
house.

Through a crack in the curtains, I saw a
pumpkin-colored Volvo wagon pull up to the curb. After a moment,
the passenger door opened and an ugly mukluk touched the ground and
tapped as if testing for thin ice. Then she stood, her golden-brown
hair spilling from the rim of her red toboggan and over the collar
of her trench coat. Plumes of mist came out between her pink lips.
A dandruff of snow collected on her shoulders as she said something
to the driver, who looked a lot like Ted. I would know those horse
teeth anywhere.

The Volvo pulled away and Beth stood looking
at my tracks heading up the sidewalk. Her hands were in the pockets
of her trench coat. She smiled. She was dreamy beautiful, as if she
were being filmed with a soft-focus lens, like Lauren Bacall in
“Casablanca,” Vivian Leigh in “Gone With The Wind,” Linda Blair in
“The Exorcist.”

She loves you, Richard. You
know what happens to the people who love you
.

I left Monique’s bedroom to its ghosts and
cobwebs and met Beth at the door.

“
Hi, handsome.” She threw
herself into Loverboy’s arms. “I missed you so much.”

“
Yeah, me, too. I missed you
so much I almost died.”

She kissed my neck and both cheeks and then
my lips and I smelled her hair. Hope Hill and Sally Bakken and
just-baked freshness. I held her at arm’s length and looked into
those swimmingly sea-green eyes.

“
We’re going to be so happy
together.” She kissed me again and I didn’t fight it. Finally, she
came up for air.

“
Tell me about the secret,”
I said.

“
Good things are worth
waiting for.”

“
The waiting’s over, Angel
Baby.”

“
It’s cold in
here.”

“
Maybe things will heat up.”
Loverboy. His idea of foreplay was to skip the first three
numbers.

She looked at the room, at the darker squares
on the walls where posters had been taken down. She looked at the
sofa, at the crusts of snow on the carpet, at the windowsill,
everywhere but at my face. This was the place where she had lost a
roommate and gained a soul mate. “I hope you’re as happy about it
as I am,” she finally said.

I held both her hands in mine. How could
these hands ever hurt anyone?

“
I’ve got a secret of my
own,” I whispered, pulling her close. Loverboy tingled. The Insider
tingled. The knife tingled.

“
Tell me,” she
said.

“
Ladies first.” Little
Hitler hissed. Bookworm hissed. The knife hissed.

She looked down again and I kissed her
forehead. I was going to miss her face. But maybe I’d hang on to it
for a while.

“
Richard. . .you remember
the first night we made love?”

“
How could I forget? That
was the best night of my life. That was the first time I really
felt…like a man.”

“
You’re sweet. It was
wonderful for me, too. In a way, I think I knew even
then.”

“
What? That you’d end up
falling in love with me?”

“
Well, that and the
secret.”

She must have forgotten everything. She had
forgotten Ted, Monique, the “I have to be sures.” The Insider had
great power. If only he could bottle it and sell it on the
drugstore shelves, or maybe in churches, we’d all be rich and the
Bone House could get a new paint job. Better yet, why not a
bestseller that told you how to make money through artificial
self-confidence? Bookworm could burn it along with his pile of
rejection slips.

“
Then tell me the
secret.”

“
Promise you won’t get
mad?”

“
Have I ever been mad at
you?”

“
Cross your heart and hope
to die?”

“
Maybe we’d better sit
down.” I squeezed her hands a little and looked into those green
eyes, into the dark pools of her pupils. What monsters might rise
from them as the Insider fed?

Her eyelashes fluttered. “We’re pregnant,
Richard.”

Silence.

More silence.

A long eternity of silences.

The sound of snowflakes falling.

How much candy could you buy for a dollar
these days?

Tension hung in the room like thunderstorm
static, like an anvil over a cartoon character, like a drunken Mel
Gibson at a bar mitzvah.

Beth flinched, awaiting…what?

So, Richard. What do you think of this
little development? Isn’t it absolutely to-die-for perfect? I saw
this one coming five chapters ago. You should have read the
outline.

I felt as if I had been kicked in the
stomach, as if a black hole had stolen the oxygen out of the air,
as if my head was a bright yawning canyon of sunbursts.

Pregnant.

So the Coldiron Curse would live on. What a
perfectly beautiful ending to the Insider’s visit. A guilt feast, a
banquet of bitterness, a host’s holiday.

The eternity stopped. The silence died as it
had lived, without a squeak of protest.

“
Are you sure?” I said,
gasping like a trout in a saucepan. She nodded and her pretty hair
shimmered in the half-light.

“
Are you sure...it’s
mine?”

“
That was the only time I
forgot.”

She hadn’t forgotten. The Insider had simply
prohibited her from remembering. The Insider had planted that seed
as surely as if it had ridden down Loverboy’s spermatic duct
itself.

No. It must have been the first time, before
Loverboy took over.

You got it, Richard. Do you think I’d let
anybody else have that honor?

“
Prophylactic prophecies,”
Mister Milktoast said. I sent him to his room without
dinner.

“
I missed my period,” Beth
said. “And then I got one of those little test kits at the drug
store. And the rest...well, that’s the big secret.”