SHUDDERVILLE TWO

Not many people lived in the boonies of Hope Hollow on the north side of town. There was nothing out here but dying family farms and woods and fallow cornfields. But this was where I decided to land. 32 Welcome Street.

I had killed a widow in Ohio.

I had killed a mechanic in Mississippi.

I had killed a minister and his wife in North Carolina.

I hadn’t killed anyone in New England yet, so I was open to anything.

It was 1971, and a war was raging. American soldiers were dying. I bought a cup of coffee at a diner on the edge of town, opened the daily newspaper and found an ad for a boarder. Delilah Kincaid of Welcome Street was renting out a room. Her husband had died in Vietnam and she needed the money. Another widow. I dug a quarter out of my pocket, located a phone booth a few blocks away and made the call.

Okay, here’s the truth. I’m one of those people who can get away with anything. I’ve led a charmed life. I don’t know why. I guess I have an angelic look about me. I guess an angel kissed me in my cradle. Maybe it’s my smile? I have a great smile, or so I’ve been told.

My name is Clay Purvis. I’m not especially handsome or good-looking. I’m pretty average in every respect, except for my hands. I inherited my father’s broad, long-fingered hands. I can grip baseball bats, shovels and axes with the same fierce assurance. My aim is true. My fingers never seem to rest. They’re always moving, tapping, fidgeting, or just plain itching to do something. My fingers will drum on any surface, telegraphing my impatience. I go through countless pencils, gripping them so tightly they snap in half. My hands like to linger on things—a car fender, the blade of a knife, a slender neck.

I move around a lot. I have lived in every state, including Alaska, where the mountains form a ring of snow-capped peaks floating in a powdered-sugar sky. My first victim was young, maybe 19—a pretty girl with hazel eyes and curly, bouncy auburn hair and razor-straight bangs. While hiking in the pristine Alaskan wilderness, I struck her on the head with a shovel and watched her stagger around for a while, her pale blue boots leaving soft impressions in the drifts. The overcast sky spit snow in my face, and the crystal cold air froze my lungs. I stood and watched her take a few staggering steps up a steep incline and then sink knee-deep into a drift. She lapped at the falling snow with her tongue. “Look,” she said, dazed and disoriented. “I’m eating snowflakes.”

It made me think twice about finishing her off.

Anybody who could say something that sincere while in the throes of death—well, it got to me, anyway. Her boyfriend was a big guy—mid-20s, healthy as a horse—and he was already dead. I’d taken care of him. Wrong place, wrong time. I split his head neatly in two with an axe, blood gushing out and freezing in a splash pattern across the unblemished snow.

The girl took one last unsteady step and sank to her thighs in the drift. She sat in the snow, tilted her face toward the sky and watched with stunned innocence as big fat flakes mushroomed out of the clouds and landed on her eyelashes. “Do you like snow?” she asked, softly astonished.

“Yeah.” I lifted my tongue to the sky. “Delicious.”

She nodded and started to cry.

All around us was a punishing silence.

I knelt down beside her and took her gloved hand. Snow fell off the distant trees with the dull thud of a small avalanche. I wondered what would happen if I stayed there with her. How long would it take before we froze to death? Minutes? Hours? I wondered if they’d find us curled together in the morning, our bodies covered in ice crystals, little blue icicles leaking out of our eyes—our frozen self-pity.

Her hands inside those brightly colored thermal gloves fascinated me.

After she was dead, I took her gloves off and played with her fingers.

*

The rambling Victorian was in desperate need of a paint job. The widow Kincaid was young and beautiful. She had intense blue eyes, long brown hair and the most delicate features I’d ever seen on a grown woman. She had two kids, a boy and a girl, and that resonated with me right away—I’d been obsessing about the number 13 lately. And here they were, a widow and two kids. I had ten victims notched on my belt. Three more would make it 13. Not that I was going to kill them, mind you. I never knew who would be spared and who would die. It was like a light-switch going off inside my head. Only I wasn’t the one turning the lights on and off.

The ten-year-old girl was cute as a button. The 14-year-old boy was dumb as mud. He wore a crazy-looking outfit—red plaid shorts, scuffed loafers with no socks, and an orange T-shirt without any logo. The three of them stood inside the kitchen squinting up at me as if I had leprosy. I could tell they weren’t used to having strangers in the house.

“I always pay in cash,” I said, pulling out a wad of bills, but the widow was going to be difficult. She eyed me with a witch’s intuition.

“I need to ask you a few questions first,” she said.

“Sure. Shoot.”

“What do you do for a living, Mr. LaCroix?”

That was the name I’d given her. Clarence LaCroix. My real name is Clay Purvis, like I said, but I’ve hated it my whole life. The other kids used to call me Purvis the Perv. “I joined the army a few years back,” I lied, “saw some action, and got hit with shrapnel. Honorable discharge.” I showed her an old scar from one of my encounters with Baldilocks—the sick son of a bitch who’d started me on this path to hell. My mother’s “boyfriend.” His hair was thinning on top, and I used to call him Baldilocks. He was a mean, vengeful son of a bitch, and if I ever found him again, I was going to kill him.

“Oh?” Delilah Kincaid said, showing more interest and warmth toward me, now that she thought I was a war veteran. The kids ogled the long jagged scar on my left arm.

“Souvenir from ‘Nam,” I said off-handedly, relishing the newfound respect in their eyes. Like I said, it was 1971 and a war was raging.
How Can You Mend a Broken Heart
by the Bee Gees was the most popular song on the radio that summer, and it seemed as if the Vietnam conflict had split America in half. Cleaved it like an axe.

“Did you fight in the tunnels?” the boy asked, his face flushed with excitement.

“Not me. I fought above ground.”

“Yessir!” He looked at his mother and laughed foolishly.

“Andy,” she chided softly, and he settled right down.

Now here’s the truth. I don’t know much about Vietnam except for what I’ve read in the headlines. But lying has always come easy for me. I guess you could say I was a born liar.

“And now?” the widow asked. “What is it you do now, Mr. LaCroix?”

“Odd jobs. This and that. Sometimes I get a gig.” I held up my guitar.

“You’re a musician?”

“Don’t worry, I won’t practice inside the house.”

“Are you a rock musician?” Andy asked, excitedly pumping his fist in the air.

“I play acoustic guitar and write my own songs.”

“Would you sing us a song?” the little girl asked.

“Maybe. Someday.”

“Cool!” the boy shouted exuberantly.

“Do you have any references?”

The widow was the only one paying attention.

“Yes, ma’am.” I pulled out the phony letters I’d typed up in Taos, New Mexico.

Her hands trembled as she read my “glowing” references. She had a child’s slender fingers. She was thin-armed and beautiful. She had sparkly blue eyes and an upturned nose.

“I can pay you a month’s rent in advance,” I told her, waving twenty-dollar bills around. Nobody’s ever refused cold hard cash. It’s just the way most of us are built. Money is better than anything, better than a succulent peach on a hot summer day.

She hesitated a moment before handing me my phony references back and taking the cash. “There are two sets of stairs. Front and back. You can use the back stairs, and your room is at the top. It’s like having your own private entry.”

Something caught my eye. Beneath her long-sleeve blouse, I saw bruises on her wrists and a raw, red scratch at the base of her throat. I wondered if she had a boyfriend with a temper. Or maybe it was her dim-witted son? Or maybe those were self-inflicted wounds? It takes all kinds, as Mama used to say.

“You and Andy can share the upstairs bathroom,” she continued. “Olive and I will use the downstairs john. Oh, and by the way, the attic is strictly off-limits.”

“Really? Why is that?”

“I keep my husband’s belongings up there, and I don’t want anything disturbed. I hope you’ll respect that.”

“Sure. Of course.”

“I had to get rid of the last boarder because he… he didn’t respect my wishes. You can’t go up there. No matter what. Do you understand?”

I nodded.

The muscles in her face tightened, and I could see that something was wrong.

“Your house, your rules,” I said.

“Breakfast is at seven,” she told me. “Dinner’s at six. You’re on your own with lunch. We go to bed around nine o’clock.”

“Well, okay. Sounds fine to me.”

But she wasn’t finished yet about the attic. She bit her lower lip and said, “Sometimes a squirrel gets into the attic and makes a racket. But please don’t catch it yourself. If that happens, just tell me and I’ll take care of it. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said. But whenever I’m told not to do something, it quickly becomes the sole focus of my desire. Once the widow had forbidden me to go up into the attic, well then… you knew exactly where I was going that night.

“Follow me, won’t you?” she said with awkward formality.

I followed her up the back stairs to the second floor. The rental room was large and square and plain. There was an old-fashioned revolving fan that blew the muggy air from one corner of the room to another. It was perfect. I needed a place to crash and think about my future. I was exhausted from my travels. I wanted to sit back for a while and see what transpired.

“I change the sheets and towels once a week,” the widow explained. She smelled like the smoke of a snuffed candle. She had streaks of gray running through her shoulder-length dark hair, and that made me wonder how old she was. 30? 40? She seemed to have been flattened by the world; her voice was flat and her expression was blank, and it pained me to look at someone so beaten down, but I just knew there had to be life inside her somewhere, heat and fire.

I moved a little closer and the floor made a loud creak.

“I can fix that in a jiffy,” I told her. “All you need’s a little linseed oil.”

“Well, thank you. That’s very kind of you.”

“And what do you do, Mrs. Kincaid?”

“Please. Call me Delilah.”

“Call me Clarence.”

She smiled. “I teach math to fifth graders, but during the summer we rent out a room.”

“You’re way too pretty to be a math teacher,” I said, and she blushed. She came to life. Her eyes sparkled. It was a pleasure to have such a positive effect on her.

“Over here’s your bureau, and this is your closet…” She showed me things that were obvious, and I could tell she wanted to linger. I could sense she wasn’t used to adult company, but that she secretly craved it. She was too busy teaching fifth-graders and raising her kids to appreciate her own femaleness. I sure appreciated it, though.

*

I brought my duffel bag in from the car, took the back stairs and opened the creaking door of my room. I crossed the uneven floorboards that announced my presence every step of the way. Damn. You couldn’t get away with much inside this creepy old house. I’d have to fix that. The furniture was plain but adequate. There were books stacked on the bedside table, along with a tattered white teddy bear with a pink ribbon around its neck. I picked up a book on financial planning entitled “Make A Million in 30 Days.” I opened it up and a few dried four-leaf clovers fell out. They’d been pressed between the pages of the book. I kicked them under the bed. Good luck charms annoyed me.

I stood gazing up at the attic. I turned off the rattling fan for a moment and stared at the cracked white ceiling. I couldn’t hear a thing up there. Not a peep. This was going to be interesting.

The bedside table wobbled, so I reached into my duffel bag for a roll of duct tape. Mama used to fix everything with duct tape—her broken eyeglasses, her busted slippers, a leaky pipe underneath the sink, a faulty electric fixture. Instead of calling the handyman, she would simply wrap everything in duct tape, and there were lots of heavy-duty rolls scattered around the house when I was growing up. Once I fell out of a tree and Mama duct-taped my broken arm before taking me to the emergency room. The base of our floor lamp was wrapped in duct tape, as were the rickety legs of her canopy bed. The tape on the bed’s legs was worn and dusty—it had been there for quite a while. Ditto the tape on the cover of the photo album she kept on her bedside table, its edges curled with age. Most of the pictures in Mama’s precious album showed a platinum-haired widow raising an average-looking boy—me. I never smiled. I never knew where to put my hands, which were about as big as elk horns. I was bland as butter.