Malice (7 page)

Sam jumped when she heard Alex’s footsteps thumping noisily up the stairs. Alex appeared with a granola bar and an apple juice. His brow furrowed. “What’s wrong?”

Think fast, dammit!

“I hate apple. Have any OJ?” she asked sheepishly.

He rolled his eyes and left again.

Sam wrenched the desk drawer open. Inside were two folders. The first was marked Derek Thomas. But the second one she hadn’t expected. It nearly sucked all the air out of her lungs. On it was a single name: McMurphy.

She slid the McMurphy folder out. Her hands trembled as she peeled back the tan flap. She leafed through the pages. The pages didn’t make a whole lot of sense to her. It looked like a crime-scene breakdown. There was a date too: November 1965.

We found most of the victims by the dining room table in an advanced state of decomposition. Judging by the odor and the stiffness of the bodies, they had been there for at least a week. Flies and cockroaches everywhere. Appears that the perpetrator assaulted the victims from behind with a three-foot wood chopping axe as they were seated at the table. In three cases, the victims were decapitated. Thomas McMurphy was found on the ground, pinned to the floor by an axe blow which appears to have severed the sternum and punctured the right lung. The victims all appear to be members of the McMurphy family. Upstairs, in one of the bedrooms we found the remains of James McMurphy. The man appeared to have died from a single self–inflicted gunshot wound through the mouth ...

Sheriff Donald Townsend

Millingham Police Dept.

Sam’s jaw fell open. Rumors had circulated for years that something awful had happened to the McMurphys. But the thought that the family’s bright and shining star, James, had hacked them to pieces seemed unbelievable. He had been some kind of businessman, she remembered, with a hand in construction, bunch of buildings in Millingham, including her school. He was reputed to have brought their fledgling town into the twentieth century.

Then something else caught her eye. Below the Sheriff’s crime-scene statement were two handwritten notations, penciled in almost as afterthoughts. The first read:

Surely there will be pressure from the highest levels to keep this quiet.

But it was the second that made the flesh on her arms tighten:

The lacerations to James McMurphy’s arms, chest and face seem, in my opinion, inconsistent with suicide: See Medical Examiner’s report. Note: could there have been someone else in the house that night?

She was thinking about her mother and the details of her death when she heard footsteps rapidly ascending the stairs. Alex was on his way back from the kitchen. Samantha shuffled the pages back into place and shoved the file into the drawer. She closed it and jammed the key in the lock. It wouldn’t turn though. In her panic she had closed the drawer on part of the folder, and it was blocking the locking mechanism. Alex was nearly there. Heart pounding, Sam yanked the drawer open, pushed the file in properly, and then locked it. She dropped the key in the coffee cup and swore. The key landed on top of the elastic bands, not underneath as she had found it. She was about to fix it when Alex appeared, out of breath and looking sour.

“Apple’s all we have.”

She smiled politely, hoping he wouldn’t notice the sweat on her brow. Did she look as pale as she felt?

“You okay?” he asked, concern in his voice.

“I’m not sure,” she said, grimacing. She had been famished when she’d sent Alex off to get her something to eat from the kitchen, but now, after all this, the only thing on her mind was phoning Lysander and telling him what she’d found. Bizarre lacerations. Questionable suicides. It was an almost preposterous theory, wasn’t it? The possibility that there was some connection between her mother’s death and James McMurphy’s nearly fifty years before. But what if? There had been a reference in the police report to McMurphy’s autopsy. They would need a copy of that. If for nothing else than to rule it out completely.

An image of her mother’s face appeared just then. Her features were pale and waxen. Her mother seemed frightened. But of what?

The stench spilling out from his grandmother’s room was sweet and acidic with ammonia, far too much like a wet diaper for his liking. If she had sprung another leak, there was no way he was gonna get stuck changing her. Not again. Besides, his grandmother weighed more than he did.

Feeding his grandmother had become a non-paying part-time job from hell. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he could drop the food by her bed and let her do the rest, but she could barely go to the bathroom by herself, let alone eat.

Though it seemed hard to believe, she hadn’t always been fat. In a wicker chest by Glenn’s bed, his father kept an old family album, one of those fancy jobs in black and white where each picture is held in place with tiny white tabs. Back in the day, she had been a real beauty. After the war, a year before she would meet her future husband—Corporal Allan Thomas Shore—she had won a handful of beauty pageants all over Chesterfield County, Illinois. She was sixteen then and the envy of every girl in town.

What now lay heaped before him was a frightening contradiction to those old family albums.

In fact, just seeing her sometimes was enough to spook him. His mother did what she could to keep the room clean, and yet it always seemed a disaster. He set the tray on the table beside her bed. Great pad for a vampire, he thought and tried to laugh. But the thought triggered an uncomfortable feeling he couldn’t shake.

What the hell could she do anyway? Reach up and grab him? He looked at his grandmother, a bulbous lump under the blankets. The top of her head was barely exposed: a mat of bluish curls. He placed a gentle, tentative hand on what he guessed was her rounded shoulder and shook her lightly. “Grandma?” The mass didn’t budge.

He shook her again, this time a little harder, and still there was no response. “Grandma, you dead?” he muttered, realizing how foolish he must sound.

“Granny Pearl, it’s time for your breakfast.”

Lysander leaned over his grandmother and began to peel the blanket away from her face. As he tugged at the covers, he half-expected to find a bloated face staring back at him. It didn’t make much sense really, considering that sometime last night his mother had probably come in to feed her. The blanket came away and he saw that his grandmother’s face was whole. Her eyes open and staring blankly at the wall behind him.

“Whasmelitno.” Her lips hardly moved now when she spoke.

Lysander stood, staring at the wall, wondering what it was she was seeing.

“It’s dark in here, isn’t it?” Lysander heard himself say. “Should we open the curtains?”

Grandma blinked.

Lysander rose and went to the heavy curtains that were blocking out the sun. They could make this place so dark sometimes it was impossible …

“Heeskhumin.”

Lysander stopped, his hand gripping the curtain. He could feel the dense fabric. His entire body was vibrating. Blood was rushing through his veins.

Sure Grandma didn’t have her dentures in, but Lysander could have sworn she’d just said ‘scuming’ or was it something else?

He’s coming
.

The room was quiet. Except he could hear his grandmother breathing, that same labored breathing he heard late at night as he lay in bed, with the lights out. He was suddenly thinking about Peter Hume again and the cryptic warning he had given Lysander.

“Grandma …?” His voice quivered.

Her head turned and she looked right at him.

“Heeskhumin!”

The hairs on Lysander’s arms were standing on end and he could feel the room pulling away from him, his grandmother’s prone body telescoping into the black shapeless distance. The left side of his brain, the logical side, the know it all, swooped in to save him.

You didn’t think those were real words she was speaking, did you? Can’t say I blame you, but the truth is that wasn’t anything other than your mind’s attempt at imposing some semblance of order on the chaos swirling around you. The way Jesus freaks always seem to find His portrait in everything from dried leaves to toilet paper
.

Jesus freak or not, it took him several minutes before he found the courage to circle the bed again to face her, and when he did she was sleeping peacefully.

He had read a book not so long ago where the author had argued that people with low mental capacity lacked the psychic and mental defenses to fend off the evil spirits, which were always patiently waiting in the shadows for a chance to slip in and take over. He’d used a hog farmer in Virginia as a case study, but Lysander had slammed the book shut then and never opened it again. Bunch of bullshit, he had said. He wondered now with some annoyance how the thought had seeped into his stream of consciousness.

***

It was between math and English when Samantha told Lysander what she had found in Alex’s desk.

“Fifty years ago, this guy McMurphy killed his family with a wood chopping axe and then blew his brains out.”

Lysander took a step back. “That’s heavy shit! But why would Alex have that locked away in his desk?”

“Good question. Maybe because if it ever got out, the town would go ape-shit. There was a sheriff, a guy named Townsend. He said he found a bunch of wounds on McMurphy’s body which struck him as odd. He wondered if there hadn’t been more to it.”

“Wounds?” Lysander’s ears perked up. He thought of the disturbing dream he had the other night, the one in which the man had disassembled his face with a block of wood. “What kind of wounds?”

“That’s where you come in.” She smiled coyly at him.

“I think I’ve known you long enough already to know what that smile means, and it’s bad news. Stop batting your eyelashes at me. Stop!” He was trying not to laugh.

She reached into her locker and pulled out a binder. “I’d owe you big time.”

“Again? But why me?”

“If I could get you a job at the medical examiner’s office, you might be able to get your hands on McMurphy’s autopsy report.”

“Oh God, Sam, I don’t know.”

“Come on, I’ve been there before. Dorothy’s got ‘em all in boxes just sitting around. Nothing to it. And besides, you love all that death stuff.”

“But why do you care so much about McMurphy all of a sudden?”

Sam grew sullen. “I have my reasons.”

That wasn’t much of a reason. “I’ll think about it.”

Samantha sighed.

Lysander licked a pair of dry lips. “Hey, have you seen Chad around?”

“No. Last I heard he was suspended.”

Lysander tried to hide his relief. “What about Summer?”

Sam rolled her eyes. “Heck if I know! What do you care about Summer anyhow?”

Lysander blushed.

“Oh shit, you don’t—”

“No I don’t,” he lied. “Well, I have noticed her looking at me.”

“Lysander, she’s probably wondering what planet you’re from.”

“I don’t think so. But let’s just say for the sake of argument that I did like her. What could a guy like me do about it?”

“Uh, you could pack your bags and run away.”

They laughed, but a knot had formed in Sam’s belly that wasn’t going

away. “Lysander, you have a lot to learn about women.”

His eyes dropped to the books in his arms. “I know.”

“Women are complex. First things first: If you want them to notice you, you have to make them jealous …”

“Really?”

“For sure!”

A light shone in his eyes. “Maybe you’re right!”

“Wha—”

“You could help me. Show me the ropes. You said it yourself, women are naturally jealous. Help me make Summer jealous. Then she’s mine.”

“But Chad’ll kill you before the two of you even hold hands.”

“Sam, you want me to go find your stupid autopsy report? That’s right, you do, don’t you? Then you’ll do this for me.”

The knot in Sam’s belly had become a ten-pin bowling ball. “All right.”

The bell rang.

Lysander turned to head for class “Sam, you’re the best!”

Derek hobbled up the creaky stairs of the old McMurphy house in search of a bathroom, in the back of his mind wondering whether Lysander was all right. Of course he is, he chided himself. He’s with Sam.

He reached the top and surveyed his surroundings. A hallway stretched out before him. He spied a room at the end, and for some reason Derek wasn’t sure why, he hated that room. It seemed to be pulling away from him, retracting like some living organism. He could feel the hairs on the back of his neck rise into hackles. An odd noise was trickling out from the edges of the closed door, like the sound of hissing static on a radio.

But this house hasn’t had power in years, right?